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MODERN SCIENCE 
AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


WITH A SUPPLEMENTAL CHAPTER 


~ ON GLADSTONE’S «DAWN OF CREATION” AND 
“PROEM OF GENESIS,’ AND ON DRUM- 
MOND’S “ NATURAL LAW IN THE 
SPIRITUAL WORLD.’ 


BY 


S. LAING. 





New York: 
THe HUMBOLDT PUBLISHING CO.,, 
28 LAFAYETTE PLACE. 





CONTENTS, 


PART J. 


MODERN SCIENCE. 


CHAPTER I. 


PAGE 
BPACE . - : S E : i ‘ ‘ ; LA, 


Primitive Ideas—Natural Standards—Dimensions of the Earth—Of Sun 
and Solar System—Distance of Fixed Stars—Their Order and Size— 
Nebulz and other Universes—The Telescope and the Infinitely Great— 
The Microscope and the Infinitely Small—Uniformity of Law—Law of 
Gravity—Acts through all Space—Double Stars, Comets, and Meteors— 
Has acted through all Time. 


CHAPTER II. 


TIME . ; ° i 4 . : 2 : . ne Wg 
Evidence of Geology—Stratification—Denudation—Strata identified by 
Superposition—By Fossils—Geological Record shown by Upturned Strata— 
General Result—Palewozoic and Primary Periods—Secondary—Tertiary— 
Time required—Coal Formation—Chalk—Elevations and Depressions of 
Land—Internal Heat of Earth—Earthquakes and Volcanoes—Changes of 
Fauna and Flora— Astronomical Time—Tides and the Moon—Sun’s 
Radiation—Earth’s Cooling—Geology and Astronomy—Bearings on Mod- 


- ern Thought. 
1015097 


4 CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER III. 
PAGE 
MATTER A ° . : - 382 
%, Ether and Light Soler and Hea! Matter a ie Elements—Molecules 


and Atoms—Spectroscope—Uniformity of Matter throughout the Uni- 
verse—Force and Motion—Conservation of Energy—Electricity, Magnet- 
ism, and Chemical Action—Dissipation of Heat—Birth and Death of 
Worlds. 


CHAPTER IV. 


LIFE . : : : : : . ° - 44 
Essence of Tite Spin plest Form, HrotopinantetMt share and Protista— 
Animal and Vegetable Life—Spontaneous Generation—Development of 
Species from Primitive Cells—Supernatural Theory—Zodlogical Prov- 
inces—Separate Creations—Law or Miracle—Darwinian Theory—Struggle 

for Life—Survival of the Fittest—Development and Design—The Hand— 
Proof required to establish Darwin’s Theory as a Law—Species—Hybrids— 
‘Man subject to Law. 


CHAPTER V. 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. : ° : ° ° - 57 
Belief in Man’s Recent Origin ARoueter de Perthes’ Discoveries—Con- 
firmed by Prestwich—Nature of Implements—Celts, Scrapers, and Flakes— 
Human Remains in River Drifts—Great Antiquity—Implements from Drift 
at Bournemouth—Bone Caves—Kent’s Cavern—Victoria, Gower, and other 
Caves—Caves of France and Belgium—aAges of Cave Bear, Mammoth, and 
Reindeer—Artistic Race—Drawings of Mammoth, etc.—Human Types— 
Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Furfooz, etc.— Attempts to fix Dates—History— 
Bronze Age—Neolithic—Danish Kitchen-middens—Swiss Lake-Dwellings— 
Glacial Period—Traces of Ice—Causes of Glaciers—Croll’s Theory—QGulf 
Stream—Dates of Glacial Period—Rise and Submergence of Land—Ter- 
tiary Man—Eocene Period—Miocene—Evidence for Pliocene and Miocene 
-Man—Conclusions as to Antiquity. 


CHAPTER VI. 


'MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE . - 89 
Origin of Man from an Hae hike ciher Mammsls—Development of the 
Embryo—Backbone—Eye and other Organs of Sense—Fish, Reptile, and 
Mammalian Stages—Comparison with Apes and Monkeys— Germs of Hu- 
man Faculties in Animals—The Dog—Insects—Helplessness of Human 
Infant—Instinct—Heredity and Evolution—The Missing Link—Races of 
‘Men—Leading Types and Varieties—Common Origin Distant—Language— 


CONTENTS. 5 


PAGE 

How Formed—Grammar—Chinese, Aryan, Semitic, ete.—Conclusions 
from Language—Evolution and Antiquity—Religions of Savage Races— 
Ghosts and Spirits—Anthropomorphie Deities—Traces in Neolithic and 
Paleolithic Times—Development by Evolution—Primitive. Arts—Tools 
and Weapons—Fire—Flint Implements—Progress from Palzolithic to 
Neolithic Times—Domestic Animals—Clothing—Ornaments—Conclusion, 
Man a Product of Evolution. 


PART II, 


MODERN THOUGHT. 


CHAPTER VII. 


MODERN THOUGHT . ela ete: 

Lines from Re yi Ceanal of Modern THoupne Change Scent 
fied by Carlyle, Renan, and George Eliot—Science becoming Universal— 
Attitude of Orthodox Writers—Origin of Evil—First Cause unknowable— 
New Philosophies and Religions—Herbert Spencer and Agnosticism— 
Comte and Positivism—Pessimism—Mormonism—Spiritualism—Dreams 
and Visions—Somnambulism—Mesmerism—Great Modern Thinkers— 
Carlyle—Hero-worship. 


CHAPTER VIII. 


MIRACLES . : . . : ° ~Aad 
Origin of Belief in the iRdpernntormbThander—-Belist in Miracles form- 
erly Universal—St. Paul’s Testimony—Now Incredible—Christian Miracles 
—Apparent Miracles—Real Miracles—Absurd Miracles—Worthy Miracles 
—The Resurrection and Ascension—Nature of Evidence required—Inspi- 
ration—Prophecy—Direct 'Evidence—St. Paul—The Gospels—What is 
Known of Them—The Synoptic Gospels—Resemblances and Differences— 
Their Origin—Papias—Gospel of St. John—Evidence rests on Matthew, 
Mark, and Luke—What each states—Compared with one another and with 
St. John—Hopelessly Contradictory—Miracle of the Ascension—Silence of 
Mark—Probable Early Date of Gospels—But not in their Present Form. 


CHAPTER IX. 


CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT MIRACLES . : + 142 
Practical and Theoretical Christianity—Example and aeching of Cheat 
Christian Dogma—Moral Objections—Inconsistent with Facts—Must be 


6 CONTENTS. 


PAGE 
accepted as Parables—Fall and Redemption—Old Creeds must be Trans- 
formed or Die—Mahometanism—Decay of Faith—Balance of Advantages 
—Religious Wars and Persecutions—Intolerance—Sacrifice—Prayer—Ab- 
sence of Theology in Synoptic Gospels—Opposite Pole to Christianity— 
Courage and Self-reliance—Belief in God and a Future Life—Based mainly 
on Christianity—Science gives no Answer—Nor Metaphysics—So-called 
Institutions—Development of Idea of God—Best Proof afforded by Chris- 
tianity—Evolution is Transforming it—Reconciliation of Religion and 
Science. 


CHAPTER X. 


PRACTIOAL LIFE . : ° . : ° . : - 153 
Conscience—Right is Right—Self-reverence—Courage—Respectability— 
Influence of Press—Respect for Women—Self-respect of Nations—Democ- 
racy and Imperialism—Self-knowledge—Conceit—Luck—Speculation— 
Money-making—Practical Aims of Life—Self-control—Conflict of Reason 
and Instinct—Temper—Manners—Good Habits in Youth—Success in Prac- 
tical Life—Education—Stoicism—Conclusion, 


SUPPLEMENTAL CHAPTER. 


Gladstone’s ‘Dawn of Creation” and ‘‘Proem to Genesis.” Drummond’s 
‘* Natural Law in the Spiritual World’. . . . . - 164. 


PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. 


HE object of this book is to give a clear and concise view of the 
principal results of Modern Science, and of the revolution which 
they have effected in Modern Thought. I do not pretend to discover 
fresh facts or to propound new theories, but simply to discharge the 
humbler though still useful task of presenting what has become the 
common property of thinking minds, in a popular shape, which may 
interest those who lack time and opportunity for studying special sub- 
jects in more complete and technical treatises. 

I have endeavored also to give unity to the subjects treated of, 
by connecting them with leading ideas: in the case of Science, that of 
the gradual progress from human standards to those of almost infinite 
space and duration, and the prevalence of law throughout the universe 
to the exclusion of supernatural interference; in the case of Thought, 
the bearings of these discoveries on old creeds and philosophies, and 
on the practical conduct of life. The endeavor to show how much of 
religion can be saved from the shipwreck of theology has been the 
main object of the second part. Those who are acquainted with the 
scientific literature of the day will at once see how much I have been 
indebted to Darwin, Lyell, Lubbock, Huxley, Proctor, and other well- 
known writers. In fact, the first part of this book does not pretend 


to be more than a compendious popular abridgment of their works. T 


$ PREFACE. 


prefer, therefore, acknowledging my obligations to them once for all,. 
rather than encumbering each page by detailed references. 

The second part contains more of my own reflections on the im- 
portant subjects discussed, and must stand or fall on its own merits. 
rather than on authority. Ican only say that I have endeavored to — 
treat these subjects in a reverential spirit, and that the conclusions: 
arrived at are the result of a conscientious and dispassionate endeavor: 


to arrive at “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” 
S. Larne. 


MODERN SCIENCE 


ND 


M@DENNs THOUGHT: 





CHAPTER I. 
SPACE. 


HE first ideas of space were naturally taken from the standard of 
man’s Own impressions. ‘Theinch, the foot, the cubit, were the | 
lengths of portions of his own body, obviously adapted for measuring 
objects of comparatively small size with which he came in direct contact. 
The mile was the distance traversed in 1,000 double paces; the league 
the distance walked in an hour. The visible horizon suggested the 
idea that the earth was a flat, circular surface like a round table; and 
as experience showed that it extended beyond the limits of a single 
horizon, the conception was enlarged, and the size of the table increased 
so as to take in all the countries known My the geography of successive 
eriods. ! 
i In like manner the sun, moon, and stars were taken to be at the dis- 
tance at which they appeared; that is, first of the visible horizon, and 
then of the larger circle to which it had been found necessary to expand 
it. It was never doubted that they really revolved, as they seemed to 
do, round this flat earth circle, dipping under it in the west at night, 
and reappearing in the east with the day. The conception of the uni- 
verse, therefore, was of a flat, circular earth surrounded by an ocean. 
stream, in the centre of a crystal sphere which revolved in twenty-four 
hours round the earth, and in which the heavenly bodies were fixed as 
lights for man’s use to distinguish days and seasons. The maximum 
idea of space was therefore determined by the size of the earth circle 
which was necessary to take in all the regions known at the time, with 
a little margin beyond for the ocean stream, and the space between it and 
the crystal vault, required to enable the latter to revolve freely. In 
the time of Homer and the early Greek philosophers, this would prob- 
ably require a maximum of space of from 5,000 to 10,000 miles. This 
dimension has been expanded by modern science into one of as many 
millions, or rather hundreds of millions, as there were formerly single 
miles, and there is no sign that the limit has been reached. 

How has this wonderful result been arrived at, and how do we feel 
certain that itis true? Those who wish thoroughly to understand it 
must study standard works on Astronomy, but it may be possible to 
give some clear idea of the processes by which it has been arrived at, and of: 


10 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


the cogency of the reasoning by which we are compelled to accept facts 
80 contrary to the first impressions of our natural senses. 
The fundamental principle upon which all measurements of space 
depend, which are beyond the actual applicationtof human standards, 1s 
this: that distant objects change their 
Lane bearings for a given change of base, 
Cachet more or less Ra ae et they are 
H less or more distant. Suppose I am 
on board a steamer sailing down the 
Thames, and I see two churches on 
the Essex coast directly opposite to 
me, or bearing due north, the first of 
which is one mile and the other ten 
miles distant. I sail one mile due 
east and again take the bearings. It 
is evident that the first church will 
now bear north-west, or have ap- 
parently moved through 45°, Ze., 
one-eighth part of the circumference 
of acomplete circle, assuming this 
circumference to be divided into 360 
equal parts or degrees; while the 
more distant church will only have 
altered its bearing by a much less 
amount, easily determined by calcu- 
lation, but which may be taken 
roughly at 5° instead of 45°. 
The branch of mathematics known as Trigonometry enables us in 
all cases, without exception, where we know the apparent displace- 
ment or change of bearing of a dis- 
*® tant object produced by taking it 
from the opposite ends of a known 
base, to calculate the distance of 
that object with as much ease and 
certainty as if we were working a 
simple sum of rule of three. The 
first step is to know our base, and 
for this purpose itis essential to 
know the size and form of the earth 
on which we live. ‘These are 
determined by very simple consid- 
erations. 
If I walk a milein a straight 
line, an object at a vast distance like 
ie astar will not change its apparent 
: place perceptibly. Butif I walk the 
& same distance in a semi-circle, what 
re: faa a =: was originally on my left hand will 
“now be on my right, or will have 
changed its apparent place by 180°. 
If I walk my mile on the circum- 
ference of a circle of twice the size, I 
shall have traversed a quadrant or one-fourth part of it, and changed 
‘the bearing of the distant object exactly halfas much, or 90°, and so 











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SPACE. 11 


on, according to the size of the circle, which may therefore be readily 
calculated from the length that must be travelled along it to shift the 
bearing of the remote object by a given amount, say of 1°. 

If, for instance, by travelling 65 miles from north to south we 
lower the apparent height of the Pole star 1°, it is mathematically 
certain that we have travelled this 65 miles, not along a flat surface, 
but along a circle which is 360 times 65, or, in round numbers, 24,000 
miles in circumference and 8,000 miles in diameter. And if, whenever 
we travel the same distance on a meridian or line drawn on the cir- 
cumference from north to south, we find the same displacement of 1°, 
we may be sure that our journey has been in a true circle, and that the 
form of the earth is a perfect sphere of these dimensions. 

Now, this is very nearly what actually occurs when we apply 
methods of scientific accuracy to measure the earth. The true form 
of the earth is not exactly spherical, but slightly oval or flatter at the 
poles, being almost precisely the form it would have assumed if it had 
been a fluid mass rotating about a north and south axis. But it is 
very nearly spherical, the true polar diameter being 7,899 miles, and 
the true equatorial diameter 7,925 miles, so that for practical pur- 
poses we may say roughly that the earth is a spherical body, 24,000 
miles round and 8,000 miles across. 

This gives us afresh standard from which to start in measuring 
greater distances. Precisely as we inferred the distance of the church 
from the steamer in our first illustration, we can infer the distance of 
the sun, from its displacement caused by observing it from two oppo- 
site ends of a base of known length on the earth’s surface. This is 
the essential principle of all the calculations, though, when great ac- 
curacy is sought for, very refined methods of applying the principle 
are required, turning mainly on the extent to which the apparent 
occurrence of the same event—such as the transit of Venus over the 
sun’s disc—is altered by observing it from different points at known 
distances from one another on the earth’s surface. The result is to 
show that the sun’s distance from the earth is, in round numbers, 93,- 
000,000 miles. This is not an exact statement, for the earth’s orbit is 
not an exact circle, but the sun and earth really revolve in ellipses 
about the common centre of gravity. The sun, however, is so much 
larger than the earth that this centre of gravity falls within the sun’s 
surface, and, practically, the earth describes an ellipse about the sun, 
the 93,000,000 miles being the mean distance, and the eccentricity, or 
deviation from the exact circular orbit, being about one-sixtieth part of 
that mean distance. This distance, again, gives us the size of the sun, 
for it is easily calculated how large the sun must be to look as large as 
it does ata distance of 93,000,000 miles. The result is, thatit is a 
sphere of about 880,000 miles in diameter. Its bulk, therefore, ex- 
ceeds that of the earth in the proportion of 1,384,000 to 1. Its 
density, or the quantity of matter in it, may be calculated from the 
effect of its action on the earth under the law of gravity at the dis- 
tance of 93,000,000 miles. It weighs as much as 354,936 earths. 

The same method gives us the distance, size, and weight of the 
moon and planets; and it gives us « fresh standard or base from which 
to measure still greater distances. The distance of the earth from the 
sun being 93,000,000 miles, and its orbit an ellipse nearly circular, it 
follows that it is in mid-winter, in round numbers, 186,000,000 miles 
distant from the spot where 1t was at mid-summer. What difference in 


12 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


the bearings of the fixed stars is caused by traversing this enormous 
base? 

The answer is, in the immense majority of cases, no difference at 
all; z.¢., their distance is so vastly greater than 186,000,000 miles that 
a change of base to this extent makes no change perceptible to the 
most refined instruments in their bearings as seen from the earth. But 
the perfection of modern instruments is such, that a change of even 
one second, or sth part of one degree, in the annual varallax, as it is 
called, of any fixed star, would certainly be detected. 

This corresponds to a distance of 206,265 times the length of the 
base of 186,000,000 miles, or of 20,000,000,000,000,000 miles, a dis- 
tance which it would take light moving at the rate of 190,000 miles 
per second, three years and eighty-three day to traverse. There is 
only one star in the whole heavens, a bright star called Alpha, in the 
constellation of the Centaur, which is known to be as near as this. Its 
annual parallax is 0:976", or very nearly 1”, and therefore its distance 
very nearly 20 millions of millions of miles. All the other stars, of 
which many millions are visible through powerful telescopes, are 
further off than this. 

There are about eight other stars which have been supposed by 
astronomers to show some trace of an annual parallax of less than 
half a second, and therefore whose distances may be somewhere from 
twice to ten times as great as that of Alpha Centauri, and from the 
quantity of light sent to us from these distances, some approximation 
has been made to their intrinsic splendor as compared with our sun. 
That of Alpha Centauri is computed to be nearly 24 times that of 
Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, 393 times greater than that 
of thesun. These fisures may or may not represent greater size or 
greater intensity of light, and they are only quoted to give some idea of 
the vastness of the scale of the universe, cf which our solar system 
forms a minute part. 

Nor does even this nearly fathom the depth of the abysses of space. 
Telescopes enable us to seea vast multitude of stars of varying size 
and brilliancy. It is computed by astronomers that there are at least 
one hundred millions of stars within the range of the telescopes used 
by Herschel for gauging the depth of space, anda thousand millions 
within the range of the great reflecting telescope of Lord Rosse. As 
many as eighteen different orders of magnitude have been counted, and. 
the more the power of telescopes is increased the more stars are seen. 
Now, as there is no reason to suppose that this extreme variety of 
brilliancy arises from extreme difference of size of one star from an- 
other, it must be principally owing to difference of distance, so that a 
star of the eighteenth magnitude is presumably many times further off 
than any of the first magnitude, the distance of the nearest of which 
has been proved to be something certainly not less than 20,000,000,000,- 
000 miles. In fact, these stellar distances are so great that in order to 
bring them at ali within the range of human imagination we are 
obliged to apply another standard, that of the velocity of light. Light 
can be shown to travelat the rate of about 186 millions of miles in 16 
minutes, for this is the difference of the time at which we see the same 
periodical occurrence, as for instance the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites, 
according as the earth happens to be at the point ofits orbit nearest 
to Jupiter or at that farthest away. The velocity of light is therefore 
about 184,000 miles per second, a velocity which has been fully con- 
firmed by direct experiments made on the earth’s surface. 


SPACE. 13 


These enormous distances are reckoned, therefore, by the number 
of years which it would take light to come from them, travelling as it 
does at the rate of 184,000 miles a second. The nearest fixed star, 
Alpha Centauri, is seen by the ray which left it three years and eighty- 
three days ago, and has been travelling ever since at the rate of 184,000 
miles per second. Sirius, the brightest of the fixed stars, if the deter- 
mination of its annual parallax is correct, is six times further off, and 
is seen, not as it exists to-day but as it existed nearly twenty years ago; 
and the light we now see from some of the stars of the eighteen magni- 
tude can hardly have left them less than 2,000 years ago. 

Even this, however, is far from exhausting our conception of the 
magnitude of space. Beyond the stars which are near enough to be 
seen separately, powerful telescopes show a galaxy in which the united 
lustre of myriads of stars is only perceptible as a faint nebulous gleam. 
And in addition to stars the telescope shows us a number of nebule, or 
faint patches of light, sometimes globular, sometimes in wreaths, spiral 
wisps, and other fantastic shapes, scattered about the heavens. Some 
of these are resolved by powerful telescopes into clusters of stars incon- 
ceivably numerous and remote, which appear to be separate universes, 
like that of which our sun and fixed stars form one. Others again 
cannot be so resolved, and are shown by the spectroscope to be enor- 
mous masses of glowing gas, or cosmic matter, out of which other 
universes are in process of formation. 

Weare thus led, step by step, to enlarge our ideas of space from 
the primitive conception of miles and leagues, until the imagination 
fails to grasp the infinite vastness of the scale upon which the material 
universe is really constructed. 

If the telescope takes us thus far beyond the standards of unaided 
sense in the direction of the infinitely great, the microscope, aided by 
calculations as to the nature of light, heat, electricity, and chemical 
action, takes us as far in the opposite direction of the infinitely small. 
The microscope enables us actually to see magnitudes of the order of 
x00,000th of an inch as clearly as the naked eye can see those of j,th. This 
introduces us into a new world, where we can see a whole universe of 
things both dead and alive of whose existence our forefathers had no 
suspicion. A glass of water is seen to swarm with life, and be the 
abode of bacteria, amosbee, rotifers, and other minute creatures, which 
dart about, feed, digest, and propagate their species in this small world 
of their own, very much as jelly-fish and other humble organisms do in 
the larger seas. The air also is shown to be full of innumerable germs 
and spores floating in it, and ready to be deposited and spring into life, 
wherever they find a seed-bed fitted to receive them. Given a favor- 
able soil in the human frame, and the invisible seeds of scarlet fever, 
cholera, and small-pox ripen into full crops, just as the germs of a 
fungus invade the potato crops of a whole district, and lead to Irish 
famines and the extermination of more than a million of human beings. 

The microscope also enables us to see the very beginnings of life 
and watch its primitive element, protoplasm, in the form of a minute 
speck of jelly-like matter, through which pulsations are constantly 
passing, and we can watch the transformations by which an elementary 
cell of this substance splits up, multiplies, and by a continued process 
of development builds up with these cells all the diversified forms of 
wegetable and animal life. 

But far as the microscope carries us down to dimensions vastly 


14 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


smaller than those of which the ordinary senses can take cognizance, 
the modern sciences of light, heat, and chemistry carry us as much 
farther downwards, as the telescope carries us upwards beyond the 
boundaries of our solar system into the expanses of stars and nebule. 
We are transported intoa world of atoms, molecules, and hght-waves, 
where the standard of measurement is no longer in feet or inches, or 
even in one-hundred-thousandth part of an inch, but in millionths of 
millimetres, 2. €., 1M 95 000,000,000 of an inch. The dimensions are such 
that, as we shall see when we come to deal with matter, if the drop of 
water in which the microscope shows us living animalcula were magni- 
fied to the size of the earth, the atoms of which it is composed would. 
appear of a size intermediate between that of a rifle-bullet and a 
ericket-ball. 

This, then, is Nature’s scale of space, from millionths of a millime- 
treup to millions of millions of miles. Throughout the whole of this 
enormous range of space the laws of Nature prevail. 

Matter attracts matter by the same law of gravity in the case of 
double stars revolving about each other at a distance at which a base of 
180,000,000 miles has long since become a vanishing point, and in the 
case of atoms which form the substance of a gas, as in that of an apple 
falling from a tree at the earth’s surface. Comets, darting off into the 
remote regions of space, return after long periods, in obedience to the 
samelaw. Clouds of meteoric dust revolve in fixed orbits, determined. 
by the law of gravity as surely as the moon revolves round the earth, 
and the earth round the sun. 

This is a conclusion of such fundamental importance that it is 
desirable to give the uninitiated reader some clear idea of what it means. 
and how itis arrived at. Newton’s great discovery, the law of gravity, 
is this—that all matter acting in the mass attracts other matter directly 
as the amount of attracting matter, and inversely as the square of the. 
distance. That is, 2 or 2,000,000 tons attract with twice the force of 
1 or 1,000,000 tons at the same distance, but with only one-fourth of 
the same force at double, and one-ninth at triple the distance. 

How is this law proved? This will be best answered by explaining 
how it was discovered. The force of gravity, or attraction of the earth 
on bodies at the earth’s surface, is a known quantity. The whole. 
matter in a spherical body attracts exactly as if it were all collected 
at the centre. The force of gravity at the earth’s surface is, therefore, 
that of the earth’s mass exerted at a distance of about 4,000 miles, and. 
this can be easily measured by observing the space fallen through, and 
the velocity acquired, by a falling body in a given time, such as 1”. 
Does the same force act at the distance of the moon, or 207,200: 

miles? This was the question Newton asked himself, and the answer 
was got at in the following way. If we swing a stone in a sling round 
our head, it describes a circle as long as we keep the string tight, and. 
its pull inwards just balances the pull of the stone to fly outwards, 7.e., 
to use scientific language, as long as the centripetal just balances the 
centrifugal force. Butif we let go the string the stone darts off in 
the direction in which, and with the velocity with which, it was moving 
when the centripetal force ceased to act. 

The moon is such asling-stone revolving about the earth. At. 
each instant it is moving in the direction of a tangent to its orbit, and. 
would move on ina straight line along this tangent if it were not. 
deflected from it by some other force. That is, if the moon were now 


e 


SPACE. 15. 


at M,, it would, after a given interval of time, be at M, if no force had. 
acted on it. But in point of fact it is not at M, but at M;. Therefore 
it has been pulled down from M, to M,, or if you like, fallen through 
the space M, M,; in the time in which it would have ‘ Ms 

travelled over M, M, with its velocity at M, How 
does this space correspond with the space through 
which a heavy body would have fallen in the same 
time at the earth’s surface? It corresponds exactly, 
assuming the law of gravity to be, that it decreases 
with the square of the distance. 

This may be taken as the first approximation, but 
the more accurate and universal proofs of the law are 
derived from mathematical calculations of what the  } 
nature of the attractions must be, in the case of the ® 
sun, earth, moon, and planets, to make them describe such elliptie 
orbits and observe such laws, as from Kepler’s observations we know 
actually to be the case. The answer here again is the law of gravity, 
and no other possible law, and this is confirmed in practice by the fact. 
that we are able, by calculations based on it, to satisfy the requisite of 
safe prophecy—that of knowing beforehand, and to predict eclipses, 
comets, transits, and occultations, and generally to compile Nautical 
Almanacs, by which ships know their whereabouts in pathless oceans. 

This, then, affords usa first firm standing-point in any specula- 
tions as to the nature of the universe. One great law, at any rate, is: 
universal throughout all space, and, as we shall see later, suns, stars, 
and nebule are composed of the same matter as the earth and its: 
inhabitants. 

In like manner comets and meteors, though presenting in other 
respects phenomena not yet fully understood, are proved to obey the 
same laws and to consist of the same matter. Comets are bodies which 
revolve round the sun, and are attracted by it and by the planets, in 
obedience to the ordinary law of gravity, though their density is so 
slight, that although often of enormous volume, they produce no per- 
ceptible effect on the planets, even when entangled amidst the satellites 
of a planet, as Lascelles’ comet was among those of Jupiter. 

Their dimensions may be judged of when it is stated that the 
comet of 1811 had a tail 120 millions of miles in length and 15 millions 
of miles in diameter at the widest part, while the diameter of the nucleus. 
was about 127,000 miles, or more than ten times that of the earth. 
In order that bodies of this magnitude, passing near the earth, should 
not affect its motion or change the length of the year by even a single 
second, their actual substance must be inconceivably rare. If the tail, 
for instance, of the comet of 1843 had consisted of the lightest sub- 
stance known to us, hydrogen gas, its mass would have exceeded that. 
of the sun, and every planet would have been dragged from its orbit. 
As Proctor says, therefore: “A jar-full of air would probably have out- 
weighed hundreds of cubic miles of that vast appendage which blazed. 
across the skies to the terror of the ignorant and superstitious.” 

The extreme tenuity of a comet’s mass is also proved by the phe- 
nomenon of the tail, which, as the comet approaches the sun, is thrown 
out sometimes to a length of 90 millions of milesin a few hours. And 
what is remarkable, this tail is thrown out against the force of gravity 
by some repulsive force, probably electrical, so that it always points. 
away from the sun. Thus a comet which approaches the sun with a 





16 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


tail behind it, will, after passing its.perihelion, recede fiom the sun 
with its tail before it, and this although the tail may be of the length 
of 200 millions of miles as in the comet of 1848. In the course of a 
few hours, therefore, this enormous tail has been absorbed and a new 
one started out in an opposite direction. And yet, thin as the matter 
of comets must be, it obeys the common law of gravity, and whether 
the comet revolves in an orbit within that of the outer planets, or 
shoots off into the abysses of space and returns only after hundreds of 
years, its path is, at each instant, regulated by the same force as that 
which causes an apple to fall to the ground; and its matter, however 
attenuated, is ordinary matter, and does not consist of any unknown 
elements. The spectroscope shows that comets shine partly by re- 
flected sunlight and partly by light of their own, the latter part being 
gaseous, and this gas, in most comets, contains carbon, hydrogen, and 
nitrogen, possibly also oxygen, in the form of hydrocarbons or marsh 
gas, cyanogen and possibly oxygen compounds of carbon. One comet 
has recently given the line of sodium, and the presence of iron is 
strongly suspected. 

As regards meteors, which include shooting stars and aérolites, it 
has been long known, from actual masses which have fallen on the 
earth, that they are composed of terrestrial matter, principally of iron, 
which has been partially fused by the heat engendered by the fiction 
of the rapid passage through the air. The recurrence of brilliant 
‘displays at regular intervals, as for instance those of August and 
November, when the whole sky often seems alive with shooting stars, 
had also been noticed; but it was reserved for recent times to prove 
that these meteor streams are really composed of small planetary bodies 
revolving round the sun in fixed orbits by the force of gravity, and that 
their display, as seen by us, arises from the earth in its revolution 
round the sun happening to intersect some of these meteoric orbits, 
and the fiction of our atmosphere setting fire to and consuming the 
smaller meteors which appear as shooting stars. This shows the 
enormous number of meteors by which space must be tenanted. It is 
proved that the earth encounters more than a hundred meteor systems, 
but the chance of any one ring or system being intersected by the 
‘earth is extremely small, as the earth is such a minute speck in the 
whole sun-surrounding space of the solar system. Ona scale on which 
the earth’s orbit was represented bya circle of 10 feet diameter, the 
earth itself would be only about ,,,th of an inch in diameter, so that if, 
as astronomers say, the earth encounters about a hundred meteor 
systems in the course of its annual revolution, space must swarm with 
‘an innumerable number of these minute bodies all revolving round the 
sun by the force of gravity. 

Has this law of gravity been uniform through all time as it 
undoubtedly is through all space? We have every reason to believe so. 
The law of gravity, which is the foundation of most of what we call the 
natural laws of geological action, has certainly prevailed, as will be 
shown later, through the enormous periods of geological time, and far 
beyond this we can discern it operating in those astronomical changes 
by which cosmic matter has been condensed into nebule, nebule into 
‘suns throwing off planets, and planets throwing off satellites, as they 
‘cooled and contracted. We cannot speak with quite the same certainty 
of infinite time as we can of infinite space, for we have no telescopes 
to gauge the abysses of time, and no certain standards, like those of 


TIME. 17 


the known dimensions of our solar system, to apply to periods too vast 
for the imagination. 

But we can say this with certainty, that the present law of gravity 
must have prevailed when the outermost planet of our system, Nep- 
tune, was condensed into a separate body and began revolving in its 
present orbit, and that it has continued to act ever since; while, as a 
matter of probability, it is as nearly certain as anything can be, that 
the law by which the apple falls to the ground is an original law of 
matter, and has existed as long as matter has existed. 

It certainly extends through all space. Double stars ata distance 
exceeding 20 millions of millions of miles revolve round their common 
centre of gravity by this law. Atoms and molecules almost infinitely 
smaller than millionths of millimetres derive from it their specific 
weights with as much certainty as if they were pounds or hundred- 
weights. 

What space and matter really may be, we do not know, and if we 
attempt to reason about their essence and origin, or quit the region 
of science based on fact, we get into the misty realms of metaphysics, 
where, like Milton’s fallen angels, we 


Find no end in wandering mazes lost. 


But this we do know of a certainty, that be matter and space what 
they may, they are subject to this one, uniform, all-pervading law; and 
attract, have always attracted, and will always attract, directly as the 
mass of the attracting matter and inversely as the square of the dis- 
tance in space at which the attraction acts. 


CHAPTER II. 
TIME. 


EKOLOGY has done for time what astronomy has for space—it 
\_ 3 _ihas expanded the limited ideas derived from natural impression 
and early tradition, into those of an almost infinite duration. This 
result is so important that it is desirable that all educated persons, 
without being professed geologists, should have some clear idea of the 
nature of the conclusions and of the evidences on which they rest. 

This I will endeavor to give. 

When we come to examine the structure of the earth—or rather 
of the outer crust of the earth which we inhabit—with the care and 
precision of scientific methods, we find that it is not of uniform com. 
position, but consists mainly of distinct layers, or strata, lying one 
over the other. This is true not only of the larger beds, or distinct 
formations, but of the details of each formation, many of which are 
built up as regularly as the layers of the Great Pyramid, while others 
are made up of layers no thicker than the leaves of a book. 

Now consider what this fact of stratification implies. In the first 
place it implies deposit from water, for there is no other agency by 
which materials can be sorted out and thrown down in horizontal 
layers, while this agency is now doing the same thing every day and 
all over the world. The Rhone flows into the lake of Geneva a turbid 
stream, and flows out of it as clear as crystal. All the matter it brings 


18 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


in is deposited at the bottom of the lake, and in course of time will fil} 
it up. This deposit varies with every alternation of flood and drought; 
the river depositing sometimes boulders and coarse gravel, sometimes 
shingle, sand, or fine mud, and carrying this material sometimes to a 
greater and sometimes to a less distance, according to the velocity of 
the stream. 

Ages hence, when the lake has been converted into dry land, it 
will be as certain, whenever a pit is dug or a well sunk in it, that it was. 
the work of a river flowing into a lake, as it is to-day, when we can see 
them at work. 

And what is true of the Rhone and the Lake of Geneva, is true on 
a larger scale of the Ganges, the Mississippi, and of every sea or 
ocean, with every river or torrent pouring into it. 

Again, the sea is perpetually wearing away the coasts of all lands, 
and, where the cliffs are soft and the tides and currents strong, at a 
very rapid rate. The materials swallowed up are rolled as shingle, 
ground into sand, or floated as fine mud, and all finally assorted and 


laid down at the bottom of the sea, not in a confused heap, but in 


regular succession. On some of them, shell-fish and other marine 
creatures live and die for generations, and their remains are covered. 
over by fresh sands or clays, and preserved for future geologists. All 
this is going on now, and when we examine the rocks we find that 
precisely the same sort of thing has been going on from the newest to 
the oldest strata. With the exception of a comparatively small amount, 
of igneous rock, which has boiled up from deep sources of molten. 
matter, and been poured out in sheets of lava, or masses of trap, 
porphyry, and granite, according to the amount of pressure it has. 
undergone and the time it has taken to cool and crystallize, all the 
earth’s surface may be said to consist of stratified matter, showing 
clear signs of having been deposited from water. Some of the oldest 
rocks, such as gneiss, may be a little doubtful, as they have clearly been 
subjected to great heat under great pressure, until they became plastic 
enough to crystallize as they cooled, and thus destroy any fossils. 
embedded in them and obliterate most of the ordinary signs of strati- 
fication. But the opinion of the best geologists is that they were 
originally stratified, and have become what is called ‘“‘metamorphic,” or 
changed by heat and pressure into the semblance of igneous rocks. 
But even if these are not included, enough remains to justify the 
general assertion that the outer crust of the earth, as known to us, is 
made up mainly of stratified materials which have been deposited from 
water. 

Now this implies another most important fact, viz., that there must. 
have been waste or denudation of existing land corresponding to the 
deposit of stratified materials under water. Water cannot generate 
these materials, and every square mile of such strata, say 10 feet thick, 
implies the removal of 10 feet from a square mile of land surface by 
rains and rivers, or of an equivalent amount of cubical content in some: 
other way, as by the erosion of a coastline. This is a very important 
consideration when we come to estimate the time required for the 
formation of such a thickness of stratified beds as we find existing. 
There must have been a fundamental crystalline rock as the earth 
cooled down from a fluid state and acquired a solid crust, and this 
rock must have been worn down by primeval seas and rivers as the: 
progressive cooling admitted of the condensation of aqueous vapor into 


e 


TIME. 19 


water. The waste of this primitive crust must have been deposited in 
strata at the bottom of those seas in thick masses, covering the original 
rock, and these again must have been partly crystallized by heat and 
pressure, and over and over again upheaved and submerged, and 
themselves worn down by fresh erosion, forming fresh deposits which 
underwent a repetition of the same process. 

A third important inference from the fact of stratification is that. 
all strata must have been originally deposited horizontally, or very 
nearly so, and in such order that the lowest is the oldest. 

Suppose we fill a jar with water, and put some white sand into. 
it, and when that has subsided to the bottom and the water is clear, 
some yellow sand, and again some red sand, it is clear that we shall 
have at the bottom of the jar three horizontal deposits or strata, one: 
white, one yellow, and one red, and that by no conceivable means can 
the order in which they were deposited have been other than first. 
white, secondly yellow, and lastly red. This law, therefore, is invaria- 
ble, that wherever it is possible to trace a series of strata lying one 
above the other, the lowest is the oldest, and the highest the youngest. 
in point of time. 

If, therefore, all the great formations, from the old Laurentian 
up to the newest Tertiary, had been deposited uniformly all over the 
world, and had remained undisturbed, and we could have seen them 
in one vertical section in a cliff twenty-five miles high—for that is. 
about their total known thickness—we should have been able without. 
further difficulty to determine their order of succession and respective 
magnitudes. 

But this is plainly impossible, for the deposits going on at any 
one time are of very different character. For instance, we have at: 
present the Globigerina ooze gradually filling the depths of the Atlan- 
tic with a deposit resembling chalk; the Gulfs of Bengal and Mexico 
silting up with fine clay from river deposits; vast tracts in the Pacific, 
Indian Ocean, and Red Sea, covered with coral and the dédris of coral- 
reefs. How could these, if upheaved into dry land and explored by 
future geologists, be identified as having been formed contempora- 
neously ? 

Suppose that coins of Victoria had been dropped in each of them, 
the geologist who discovered these coins would have no difficulty in 
concluding that the strata in which they were found were all formed 
in the nineteenth century. The petrified shells and other remains: 
found in geological strata are such coins. Hvery great formation has: 
had its own characteristic fauna and flora, or aggregate of animal and 
vegetable life, varying slowly from one geological age to another, and. 
linked to the past and future by some persistent types and forms, but. 
still with such a preponderance of characteristic fossils as to enable. 
us to assign the rocks in which they occur to their proper place in 
the volume of the geological record. Innumerable observations have 
shown that wecan rely, with absolute confidence, on the fossils: 
embedded in the different strata of the earth’s crust as tests of the 
period to which they belong, however different the strata may be in 
mineral composition. 

The next question is how we can ascertain the thickness and 
order of succession of these strata. We have seen that all stratified 
rocks were originally deposited from water and therefore horizontally. 
Had they remained so, in the first place the process of forming strati- 


20 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


fied rocks must long ago have come to an end, for all the land surface 
must have been worn down to the sea level, and with no more land 
to be- denuded, deposition must have ceased at an early period of 
the earth’s history. And, in the second place, we could have known 
nothing more of the earth’s crust than we saw on the surface, and in 
the shallow pits and borings we could sink below it. But earthquakes 
and volcanoes, and the various fractures and pressures due to sub- 
terranean heat and secular contraction and cooling, have been at work 
counteracting the effects of denudation, and causing elevations and 
depressions by which the inequalities of the earth’s surface have been 
renewed, the balance between sea and land maintained, and strata, 
originally horizontal at the bottom of the ocean, upheaved until sea- 
shells are found at the top of high mountains, and we can walk for 
miles over their upturned edges. 7 

Any one who wishes to understand how geologists have been able 
to measure such a thickness of the earth’s crust, has only to take a 
book open at page 1 and lay it flat before him. Hecan see nothing 
but that one page; but if he turns up the pages on the right-hand 
side of the book until their edges become horizontal, he can pass over 
them and count perhaps 500 pages in the space of a coupie of inches. 

This is precisely what geologists have been able to do at various 
points of the earth’s surface where the upturned edges of the pages 
of its history are exposed, and they come out, one behind the other, 
in the due succession in which they were written by Nature. For 
instance, in travelling from east to west in England we pass continu- 
ally from newer to older formations—Chalk comes in from below 
Tertiary; Oolite and Lias from below Chalk; then Permian or New Red 
Sandstone; Carboniferous, including the Coal measures; Devonian or 
Old Red Sandstone; Silurian, Cambrian, and in the extreme north-west 
~-of Scotland and the Hebrides, oldest of all the Laurentian. 

There are some omissions and interpolations, but, in a general 
way, it may be said that within the bounds of the British Empire we 
have such a view of Nature’s volume as would be got, in the case L 
have supposed, by travelling over its upturned edges from page 1 to 
page 500. And if each of the great formations be taken as a separate 
chapter, each chapter will be found to be made up of anumber of pages, 
each with its own letter-press and illustrations, though connected with 
the pages before and after it by the thread of the continuous common 
subject of their proper chapter; as the chapters again are connected by 
the continuous common subject-matter of the complete volume. It 
must not be supposed that the volume is anything like perfect. We 
have to piece it together from fragments found in the limited number 
of countries which have thus far been scientifically explored, and which 
do not constitute more than a small part of the earth’s surface. We 
know nothing of what is below the oceans which cover three-fourths 
of that surface, and there are great gaps in the record during times 
‘when portions of the surface were dry land, and consequently no 
deposit of strata or preservation of fossils was possible. Still a great 
‘deal has been accomplished, and the general result, as given by common 
consent of the best geologists, is as follows: 

The total thickness of known strata is about 130,000 feet or twenty- 
five miles, or the ,,th part of the distance from the earth’s surface to 
its centre. Of this, about 30,000 feet belong to the Laurentian, which 
is the oldest known stratified deposit; 18,000 to the Cambrian, and 


TIME. 21 


22,000 to the Silurian. These form together what is known as the 
Primary or Palzozoic Epoch. 

In the lowest, the Laurentian, the only faint trace of life. discov- 
ered is that of the Hozoon Canadense, which is considered to be an 
undoubted petrifaction of a foraminiferous living organism with a cham- 
bered shell. 

It must be remembered, however, that these earliest formations 
have been so changed by slow crystallization under great heat and 
pressure that all fossils and nearly all traces of stratification must have 
been obliterated. 

In the Cambrian and Lower Silurian traces of life become more 
frequent, especially of low forms of sea-weeds, and in the Upper Silurian 
we find.an abundance of life, consisting of crustacea, shell-fish, and a few 
true fish in the upper strata. Some of these shells, as the Lingula, have 
continued without much change up to the present time; and on the 
whole we find ourselves in the Silurian period, if not earlier, in presence 
of a state of things in which substantially present causes operated and 
present conditions were in force. Rains fell, winds blew, rivers ran, 
waves eroded cliffs, shell-fish lived and died, and crabs and sand-worms 
crawled about on shores left dry by each tide, very much as is the case 
at present. 

The next great divison, which got the name of Primary before the 
existence of fossils was known in the older or Paleozoic division, com- 
prises the Devonian or Old Red Sandstone; the Carboniferous which 
includes the coal; and the Permian or New Red Sandstone. | The aver- 
age thickness of these three systems taken together is about 42,000 
feet. It may be called the era of Fern Forests and of Fish, the 
former being the principal source of our supplies of coal, and the 
latter being extremely abundant within the Devonian and Permian 
formations. 

The third great division is formed by the Secondary group, which 
includes the Triassic, the Jura, and the Cretaceous or Chalk systems, 
and has an average thickness of about 15,000 feet. This epoch is 
emphatically the age of Reptiles as the preceding one was that of 
Fish, and the prevailing vegetation is no longer one of ferns and 
mosses, but of Gymnosperms, or plants having naked seeds, the most 
important class of which is that of the Coniferze or Pine tribe. Dur- 
ing this period the Plesiosauri, Ichthyosauri, and other gigantic sea- 
dragons abounded in the oceans; colossal land-dragons, such as the 
Dinosauri, occupied the continents, and Pterodactyls, a remarkable 
form of carnivorous flying lizards, ruled the air. Swarms of other 
reptiles, nearly related to the present lizards, crocodiles, and turtles, 
abounded both in the sea and land. A few traces of mammals and 
birds show that these orders had then come into existence, just as a 
few traces of reptiles are found in the Primary and of fish in the 
Paleozoic strata, but the few mammalian remains found are of small 
animals of the marsupial or lowest type, and the birds are of a transi- 
tion type between reptiles and true birds. This epoch concludes with 
the Chalk formation, which is one of deep-sea deposit, where no trace 
of terrestrial life can be expected. 

Above this comes the Tertiary epoch, when the present order, 
both of vegetable and animal life, is fairly inaugurated; mammals 
predominate over other forms of vertebrate animals; existing order, 
and species begin to appear and increase rapidly; and vegetation 


22 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


consists mainly of Angiosperms, or plants with covered seeds, as in our 
present forests. The total thickness of these strata, from the lowest 
or Eocene, to the end of the uppermost or Pliocene, is about 3,000 
feet. Above this comes the Quarternary, or recent period, which 
comprises the superficial strata of modern formation, and is character- 
ized by the undoubted existence of man and of animal species, which 
either now exist or have become extinct in quite recent geological 
times. 

The details of this and of the Tertiary Epoch will be more fully 
considered when we come to treat of the antiquity of man, with which 
they are closely connected. But for the present object, which is that 
of ascertaining some standard of time for the immense series of 
ages proved by geology to have elapsed since the earth assumed its 
present condition, became subject to existing laws and fitted to be the 

abode of life, it will be sufficient to refer to the older strata. 

The best idea of the enormous intervals of time required for 
geological changes will be derived from the coal measures. These 
consist of part only of one geological formation known as the 
Carboniferous. They are made up of sheets or seams of condensed 
vegetable matter, varying in thickness from less than an inch to as 
much as thirty feet, and lying one above another, separated by beds of 
rocks of various composition. As a rule, every seam of coal rests upon 
a bed of clay, known as the ‘“under-clay,” and is covered by a bed of 
sandstone or shale. These alternations of clay, coal, and rock, are 
often repeated a great many times, and in some sections in South 
Wales and Nova Scotia, there are as many as eighty or a hundred 
seams of coal, each withits own under-clay below and sandstone or 
shale above. Some of the coal seams are as much as thirty feet 
thick, and the total thickness of the coal measures is, in some cases, as 
much as 14,000 feet. 

Now consider what these facts mean. Every under-clay was 
clearly once a surface soil on which the forest vegetation grew, whose 
accumulated débris forms the overlying seam of coal. The under-clays 
are full of the fibres of roots, and the stools of trees which once grew 
on them, are constantly found in situ, with their roots attached just as 
they stood when the tree fell, and added to the accumulation of 
vegetable matter, which in modern times forms peat, and in more 
ancient days, under different conditions of heat and pressure, took the 
more consolidated form of coal. 

When these vegetable remains are examined with the aid of the 
microscope it is found that these ancient forests consisted mainly of 
trees like gigantic club-mosses, mares’-tails, and tree ferns, with a few 
resembling yews and firs. But in many cases the bulk of the coal is 
composed of the spores and seeds of these ferns and club-mosses, 
which were ripened and shed every year, and gradually accumulated 
into a vegetable mould, just as fallen leaves, beech-mast, and other 
débris gradually form a soil in our existing forests. 

The time required must have been very great to accumulate 
vegetable matter, principally composed of fine spore dust, to a depth 
sufficient under great compression to give even a foot of solid coal. 
Dr. Dawson, who has devoted great attention to the coal-fields of 
America, says: ‘‘ We may safely assert that every foot of thickness of 
pure bituminous coal implies the quiet growth and fall of at least fifty 
generations of Sigillaria, and therefore an undisturbed condition of 


ary TIME. 23 


forest growth, enduring through many centuries.” But this is only 
the first step in the measure of the time required for the formation 
of the coal measures. Each seam of coal is, as we have seen, covered 
‘by a bed of sand or shale, z.e¢., of water-borne materials. How can 
this be accounted for? Evidently i in one way only—that the land sur- 
face in which the forest grew subsided gradually until it became first 
amarsh, and then a lagoon or shallow estuary, which silted up by 
degrees with deposits of sand or mud, and, finally, was upraised until 
its surface became dry land, in which a second forest grew, whose 
débris formed a second coal seam. And so on, over and over again, 
until the whole series of coal measures had been accumulated, when 
this alternation of slight submergences and slight rises came to an 
end, and some more decided movement of the earth’s surface in the 
locality brought on a different state of things. This isin fact exactly 
what we see taking place on a smaller scale in recent times in such 
deposits as those of the delta of the Mississippi, where a well sunk 
at New Orleans passes through a succession of cypress swamps and 
forest growths, exactly like those now growing on the surface, which 
are piled one above the other, and separated by deposits of river silt, 
showing a long alternation of periods of rest when forests grew, fol- 
lowed by periods of subsidence when they were flooded and their 
remains were embedded in silt. 

Starting on Dr. Dawson’s assumption that one foot of coal 
represents fifty generations of coal plants, and that each generation 
of coal plants took ten years to come to maturity, an assumption 
which is certainly very moderate, and taking the actually measured 
thickness of the coal measures in some localities at 12,000 feet, Pro- 
fessor Huxley calculates that the time represented by the Coal forma- 
tion alone would be six millions of years. Such a figure is, of course, 
only a rough approximation, but it is sufficient to show that when we 
come to deal with geological time, the standard by which we must 
measure is one of which the unit is a million of years. 

This standard is confirmed by a variety of other considerations. 
Take the case of the Chalk formation. 

Chalk is almost entirely composed of the microscopic shells of 
minute organisms, such as now float in the upper strata of our great 
oceans, and by their subsidence, in the form of an impalpable shell- 
dust, accumulate what is called the “Globigerina ooze,” which is 
brought up by soundings in the Atlantic and Pacific from great 
depths. In fact, we may say that a chalk formation is now going on 
in the depths of existing oceans, and conversely that the old chalk, 
which now forms hills and elevated downs, was certainly deposited 
at the bottom of similar deep oceans of the Cretaceous period. The 
rate of deposit must have been extremely slow, certainly much slower 
than that of the deposit of the much grosser matter brought down 
by the Nile in its annual inundations, the growth of which has been 
estimated from actual measurement at about three inches per cen- 
tury. If one inch per century were the rate of accumulation of this 
microscopic shell-dust, subsiding slowly to depths of two or three 
miles over areas as large as Europe, it would take 1,200 years to form 
a foot of chalk, and 1,200,000 years to form 1,000 feet. Now there 
are places where the thickness of the Cretaceous formation, exposed 
by the edges of its upturned strata, exceeds 5,000 feet, so that this 
gives an approximation eae similar to that furnished by the coal 
lueasures. 


24 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


We have thus, on a rough approximation, a minimum period 
of about 6,000,000 years for the accumulation of a single member: 
of one of the separate formations into which the total 180,000 feet of 
measured strata are subdivided. But this takes no account of the lone 
periods during which no accumulation took place at the localities in 
question, and of the long pauses which must have ensued between each 
movement of elevation and submergence, and especially between the 
disappearance of an old and appearance of an almost entirely new 
epoch, with difterent forms of animal and vegetable life. We may be 
certain also that weare far from knowing the total thickness of strata 
which will be disclosed when the whole surface of the earth comes to 
be explored. All we can say is that we have fragmentary pages 
left in the geological record for, at the very least, 100 millions of 
years, and that probably the lost pages are quite as numerous as those 
of which we have an imperfect knowledge. 

Sir Charles Lyell, the highest authority on the subject, is in- 
clined to estimate the minimum of sreological time at 200 millions of 
years, and few geologists will say thas his estimate appears excessive. 

Another test of the vast duration of geological time is afforded by 
the oscillations of the earth’s surface. At first sight we are apt to 
consider the earth as the stable and the sea as the unstable element. 
But in reality it is exactly the reverse. Land has been perpetually 
rising and falling while the level of the sea has remained the same. 
This is easily proved by the presence of sea-shells and other marine. 
remains in strata which now form high mountains. In the case of 
chalk, for instance, there must have been in England a change of 
relative level of sea and land or more than two miles of vertical height, 
between the original formation of the chalk at the bottom of a deep 
ocean and its present position in the North and South Downs. In 
other cases the change of level is even more conspicuous. The Num- 
mulite limestone, which is formed like chalk from an accumulation of 
the minute shells of low organisms floating in the oceans of the 
early Tertiary period, is found in mountain masses, and has been 
elevated to a height of 10,000 feet and more in the Alps and 
Himalayas. 

On a smaller scale, and in more recent times, raised beaches with. 
existing shells and lines of cliffs and caves, are found at various heights 
above the existing sea-level of many of the coasts of Britain, Scandi- 
navia, Italy, South America, and other countries. 

Now the first question is, were these changes caused by the land 
rising or by the sea falling? The answer is, by the land rising Had 
they been caused by the sea standing at a higher level it must have 
stood everywhere at this level, at any rate in the same hemisphere and 
anywhere near the same latitude. But there are large tracts of land 
which have never been submerged since remote geological periods; 
and in recent times there is conclusive evidence that the changes of 
level of sea and land have been partial and not general. Thusin the 
well-known instance of the columns of the ruined temple of Serapis at. 
Pozzuoli in the Bay of Naples, which forms the illustration on the. 
title-page of Lyell’s “Principles of Geology,” there can be no doubt. 
that since the temple was built, either the sea must have risen and 
since fallen, or the land sunk and since risen, at least twenty feet since 
the temple was built less than 2,000 years ago, for up to this height the 
marble columns are riddled by borings of marine shells, whose valves. 


¢ TIME. 5: 


are still to be seen in the holes they excavated. But an elevation of: 
the level of the Mediterranean‘of twenty feet would have submerged 
a great part of Egypt, and other low-lying lands on the borders of 
that sea, where we know that no such irruptions of salt water have 
taken place within historical, or even within recent geological times. 

The conclusion is therefore certain, that the land at this particular: 
spot must have sunk twenty feet, and again risen as much, so as to 
bring back the floor of the temple t to its present position, which stood. 
one hundred years ago just above the sea-level, and that so gradually 
as not to throw down the three columns which are still standing. A. 
slow subsidence has since set in and is now going on, so that the floor 
is now two or three feet below the sea-level. 

Similar proofs may be multiplied to any extent. Along the coasts 
of the British Islands we find, in some places submarine forests show- 
ing subsidence, in others raised beaches showing elevation, but they 
are not continuous at the same level. Along the east coast of Scotland. 
there is x remarkable raised beach at a level of about twenty-four feet 
above the present one, showing in many places lines of cliff, sea-worn. 
caves, and outlying stacks and skerries, exactly like those of the 
present coast, though with green fields or sandy links at their base, 
instead of the waves of the German Ocean. But as we go north this. 
inland cliff gets lower and gradually dies out, and when we get into 
the extreme north, among the Orkney and Shetland Islands, there are 
no signs of raised beaches, and everything points towards the recent. 
period having been one of subsidence. 

Again, in Sweden, where marks were cut in rocks in sheltered 
situations on the tideless Baltic more than a century ago, so as to test. 
the question of an alleged elevation of the land, it has been clearly 
shown that, in the extreme north of Sweden, the marks have risen. 
nearly seven feet, while in the central portion of the country they have 
neither risen nor fallen, and in the southern province of Scania they 
have fallen. 

This would be clearly impossible if the sea and not the land had. 
been the unstable element, and apparent elevations and depressions 
had been due to a general fall or rise in the level of all the seas of the. 
northern hemisphere. 

In fact, the more we study geology the more we are impressed 
with the fact that the normal state of the earth is, and has always 
been, one of incessant changes. Water, raised by evaporation from 
the seas, falls as rain or snow on land, wastes it away and carries it. 
down from higher to lower levels, to be ultimately deposited at the 
bottom of the sea. This goes on constantly, and if there were no 
compensating action, as the seas cover a much larger area than the 
lands, all land would ultimately disappear, and one universal ocean cover 
the globe. But inward heat supplies the compensating action, and new 
lands rise and new mountain chains are upheaved to supply the place 
of those which disappear. 

This inward heat of the earth is not a mere theory but an 
ascertained fact; for as we descend from the surface in deep mines or 
borings, we find the temperature actually does increase at a rate which 
varies somewhat in different localities, but which averages about uy 
Fahrenheit for every 60 feet of depth. At this rate of increase water 
would boil at a depth of 10,000 feet, and iron and all other metals be 
melted before we reached 100,000 feet. What actually occurs at great. 


26 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


lepths we do not know with any certainty, for we are not sufficiently 
acquainted with the laws under which matter may behave when under 
enormous heat combined with enormous pressure. But we do know 
from voleanoes and earthquakes that masses of molten rocks and of 
imprisoned gases exist in certain localities, at depths below the surface 
which, although large compared with our deepest pits, are almost 
‘infinitesimally small compared with the total depth of 4,000 miles 
from that surface to the earth’s centre. 

This much is clear, that, in order to account for observed facts, 
we must consider the extreme outer crust, or surface of the earth as 
known to us, as resting on something which is liable to expand and 
contract slowly with variations of heat, and occasionally, when the 
tension becomes great, to give violent shocks to the outer crust, send- 
‘ing earthquake waves through it, and to send up gases and molten 
lava through volcanoes, along lines of fissure, and at points of least 
resistance. itis clear, also, that these movements are not uniform, 
but that one part of the earth’s surface may be rising while another is 
sinking, and portions of it may be slowly tilting over, so that as one 
end sinks the other rises. 

The best comparison that can be made is to a sheet of ice which 
-has been much skated over and cracked in numerous directions, so as 
to have become a sort of mosaic of ice fragment, which, when a thaw 
-sets in and the ice gets sloppy, rise and fall with slightly different 
‘motions as a skater, gliding over them, varies the pressure, and 
occasionally give a crack and let water rise through from below in the 
line of fissure. The difficulty will not seem so great if we consider 
that the rocks which form the earth’s crust are for the most part 
elastic, and that an amountof elevation which seems large in itself does 
not necessarily imply a very steep gradient. Thus, if the elevation 
which towards the close of the Glacial period carried a bed of existing 
‘sea-shells of Arctic type to the top of the hill, Moel Tryfen, in North 
Wales, which is 1,200 feet high, were, say one of 1,500 feet, this would 
be given by a gradient of 15 feet a mile, or 1in 333 for 100 miles. 
Such a gradient would not be perceptible to the eye, and would 
certainly not be sufficient to cause any tension likely to rupture rocks 
or disturb strata. 

Such movements are as arule extremely slow. In volcanic regions 
there are occasionally shocks which raise extensive regions a few feet 
at a blow, and partial elevations and subsidences which throw up cones 
.of lava and cinders, or let mountains down into chasms, in a single 
explosion. The most noted of these are the instances of Monte Nuovo, 
near Naples, 800 feet high, and Jorullo, in Mexico, thrown up in one 
eruption, and the disappearance the other day of a mountain 2,000 feet 
‘high in the Straits of Sunda during an earthquake. The largest rise 
recorded of an extensive area from the shock of an earthquake, is that 
which occured in South America in 1835, when a range of coast of 500 
miles from Copiapo to Chiloe was permanently raised five or six feet 
by a single shock, as was shown by the beds of dead mussels and other 
‘shells which had been hoisted up in some places as much as ten feet. 
It is probable that the great chain of the Andes, whose highest sum- 
mits reach 27,000 feet, has been raised in a great measure by a 
‘succession of similar shocks. 

But for the most part these movements, whether of elevation or 
-depression, go on so slowly and quietly that they escape observation 


® LIIME. 27 


Scandinavia is apparently now rising and Greenland sinking, but most 
countries have remained appreciably steady, or nearly so, during the 
historical period. St. Michael’s Mount, in Cornwall, is still connected 
with the mainland by a spit, dry at ebb tide and coveredat flood, as it 
‘was more than 2,000 years ago when the old Britons carted their tin 
across to Phoenician traders. Egypt, during a period of 7,000 years, 
has preserved the same level, or at the most has sunk as slowly as the 
Nile mud has accumulated. Parts of the English and Scotch coast have 
risen perhaps twenty feet since the prehistoric period, when canoes 
were wrecked under what are now the streets of Glasgow, and whales 
were stranded in the Carse of Stirlng. There is even some evidence 
that the latest rise may have occurred since the Roman wall was built 
from the Forth to the Clyde. In any case, however, the movements 
have been extremely slow, and there have .been frequent oscillations, 
and long pauses when the level of land and sea remained stationary. 
The evidence, therefore, from the great changes which have occurred 
during each geological period, points to the same conclusion as that 
drawn from the thickness of formations, such as the coal measures 
and chalk, which must have been accumulated very slowly, viz., that 
geological time must be measured by a scale of millions of years. 
Another test of the vast duration of geological time is afforded by 
the changes which have taken place in animal life as we pass from one 
formation to another, and even within the limits of the same formation. 
The fauna, or form of existing life at a given period, changes with 
extreme slowness. During the historical period there has been no 
perceptible change, and even since the Pliocene period, which cannot 
be placed at a less distance from us than 200,000 years, and probably 
at much more, the change has been very small. In the limited class of 
large land animals it has been considerable; but if we take the far 
more numerous forms of shell-fish and other marine life, the old species 
which have become extinct and the new ones which have appeared, do 
not exceed five per cent. of the whole. This is the more remarkable as 
great vicissitudes of climate and variations of sea-level have occurred 
during the interval. The whole of the Glacial period has come and 
gone, and Britain has been by turns an archipelago of frozen islands, 
and part of a continent extending over what is now the German Ocean, 
and pushing out into the Atlantic up to the one hundred fathom line. 

Reasoning from these facts, assuming the rate of change in the 
forms of life to have been the same formerly, and summing up the 
many complete changes of fauna which have occurred during the 
separate geological formations, Lyell has arrived at the conclusion 
that geology requires a period of not less than 200 millions of years 
to account for the phenomena which it discloses. 

Long as the record is of geological time, it is only that of one 
short chapter in the volume of the history of the universe. Geology 
only begins when the earth had cooled down into a state resembling 
the present; when winds blew, rains fell, rivers and seas eroded rocks 
and formed deposits, and when the conditions were such that life 
became possible by the remains of which those deposits can be 
identified. 

But before this period began, which may be called that of the 
maturity or middle age of our planet, a much vaster time must be 
allowed for the contraction and cooling of the vaporous ether or 
cosmic matter of which it is formed, into the state in which the 


28 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


phenomena of geology became possible. Andif vast in the case of 
the earth, how must vaster must be the life periods of the larger 
planets, such as Jupiter, which from their much greater size cool and 
contract much more slowly, and are not yet advanced beyond the 
stage of intense youthfui heat and glowing luminosity which was left 
behind by our earth a great many tens of millions of years ago! And 
how vastly vaster must be that of the sun, whose mass and volume 
exceed those of Jupiter in a far higher ratio than Jupiter surpasses. 
the earth! 

And beyond all this in a third degree of vastness come the life 
periods of those stars or distant suns, which we know to be in some 
cases aS much as three hundred times larger than our sun, and not. 
nearly so far advanced as it in the process of emergence from the 
fiery nebulous into the solar stage. 

To give some idea of the vast intervals of time required for these 
changes, a few facts and figures may be given. 

One of the latest speculations of mathematical science is that 
the rotation of the earth is becoming slower, or in other words the 
day becoming longer, owing to the retarding action of the tides, which 

_act as a brake on a revolving wheel. If so, mathematical calculation 
shows that the effect of the reaction on the moon of this action of 
the moon on the earth, must be that as the earth rotates more slowly, 
the moon recedes toa greater distance. And vice versd, when the 
earth rotated more rapidly the moon was nearer to it, until at length, 
when the process is carried back far enough, we arrive at a time when 
the moon was at the earth’s surface and the length of the day about. 
three hours. In this state of things the moon is supposed to have 
been thrown off from the earth, either by one great convulsion, or, 
more probably, by small masses at a time forming a ring like that of 
Saturn, which ended by coalescing into a single satellite. With 
‘the moon, which is the principal cause of the tides, so much nearer 
the earth, their rise and fall must have been something enormcus, and. 
huge tidal waves like the bore of the Bay of Fundy, but perhaps 500 
or 1,000 feet high, must have swept twice during each revolution of the 
earth on its axis, ¢.¢., twice every three or four hours, along all the 
narrower seas and channels and over all except the mountainous lands 
adjoining. 

Now these conclusions may be true or not as regards phases of 
the earth’s life prior to the Silurian period, from which downwards. 
geology shows unmistakably that nothing of the sort, or in the least 
degree approaching to it, has occurred. But what I wish to point. 
out is that all this superstructure of theory rests on a basis which 
really does admit of definite demonstration and calculation. 

Halley found that when eclipses of the sun, recorded in ancient 
annals, are compared with recent observations, a discrepancy is discov- 
eredin the rate of the moon’s motion, which must have been slightly 
slower then than it is now. Laplace apparently solved the difficulty by 
showing that this was an inevitable result of the law of gravity, when 
the varying eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was properly taken into 
account; and the calculated amount of the variation from this cause. 
was shown to be exactly what was required to reconcile the observa- 
tions. Butour great English mathematician, Adams, having recently 
gone over Laplace’s calculations anew, discovered that some factors in 
the problem had been omitted, which reduced Laplace’s acceleration of 


ITME. 29 


the moon’s motion by about one-hal’, leaving the other half to be 
explained by a real increase in the length of the sidereal day, or time 
of one complete revolution of the earth about ils axis. The retarda- 
tion required is one sufficient to account for the total accumulated Icss 
of an hour and a quarter in 2,000 years; or in other words, the length 
of the day is now more by about sith part of a second than it was 
2,000 years ago. 

At this rate it would require 168,000 years to make a difference of 
1 second in the length of the day; 10,080,000 years for a difference of 
1 minute; and 604,800,000 years for a difference of 1 hour. The rate 
would not be uniform for the past, for as the moon got nearer it would 
cause higher tides and more retardation; still, the abyss of time seems 
almost inconceivable to get back to the state in which the earth could 
have rotated in three hours and thrown off the moon. 

It is right, however, to state that all mathematical calculations of 
time, based on the assumed rate at which cosmic matter cools into suns 
and planets, and these into solid and habitable globes, are in the high- 
est degree uncertain. If the original data are right, mathematical 
calculation inevitably gives right conclusions. But if the data are 
wrong, or what is the same thing, partial and imperfect, the conclusions 
will, with equal certainty, be wrong also. Now in this case we certainly 
do not know “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
truth” respecting these processes. ‘Take what is perhaps the most 
difficult problem presented by science—how the sun keeps up so 
' uniformly the enormous amount of heat which itis constantly radiat- 
ing into space. This radiation is going on in every direction, and the 
solar heat received by the earth is only that minute portion of it 
which is intercepted by our little speck of a planet. All the planets 
together receive less than one 230,000,000th part of the total heat 
radiated away by the sun and apparently lost in space. Knowing the 
amount of heat from the sun's rays received at the earth’s surface in a 
given time, we can calculate the total amount of heat radiated from 
the sun in that time. It amounts to this, that the sun in each second 
of time parts with as much heat as would be given out by the burning 
of 16,436 millions of millions of tons of the best anthracite coal. And 
radiation certainly at this rate, if not a higher one, has been going on 
ever since the commencement of the geological record, which must 
certainly be reckoned by a great many tens of millions of years. 

What an illustration does this afford of that apparent ‘waste of 
Nature” which made Tennyson ‘falter where he firmly trod” when he 
came to consider “her secret meaning in her deeds!” 

Yet there can be no doubt that vast as these figures are, they are 
all the result of natural laws, just as we find the law of gravity 
prevailing throughout space at distances expressed by figures equally 
‘vast. The question is, what laws? The only one we know of at present 
at all adequate to account for such a generation of heat, is the trans- 
formation into heat of the enormous amount of mechanical force or 
energy, resulting from the condensation of the mass of nebulous 
matter from which the sun was formed, into a mass of its present 
dimensions. Thisis no doubt a true cause as far as it goes. Itis 
true that as the mass contracts, heat would be, so to speak, squeezed 
out of it, very much as water is squeezed out of a wet sponge by 
compressing it. But it is a question whether it is the sole and 
‘sufficient cause. Mathematicians have calculated that even if we 


30 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


suppose the original cosmic matter to have had an infinite extension, 
its condensation into the present sum would only have been sufficient to 
keep up the actual supply of solar heat for avout 15 millions of years. 
Of this a large portion must have been exhausted before the earth was 
formed asa separate planet, and had cooled down into a habitable 
globe. But even if we took the whole it would be altogether insuf- 
ficient. Ail competent geologists are agreed in requiring at least 100 
millions of years to account for the changes which have taken place in 
the earth's surface since the first dawn of life recorded in the older 
rocks. 

Various attempts have been made to reconcile the discrepancy. 
For instance, it has been said that the constantly repeated impact of 
masses of meteoric and cometic matter falling into the sun must have 
caused the destruction of a vast amount of mechanical energy which 
would be converted into heat. This is true as far as it goes, but it is. 
impossible to conceive of the sun asa target kept ata perpetual and 
uniform white heat for millions of years by a rain of meteoric bullets. 
constantly fired upon it. More plausibly it is said that we know 
nothing of the interior constitution of the sun, and that its solid 
nucleus may be vastly more compressed than is inferred from the 
dimensions of its visible disc, which is composed of glowing flames and 
vapors. This also may be a true cause, but, after making every 
allowance, we must fall back on the statement that the continuance for 
such enormous periods of such an enormous waste of energy as is 
given out by the sun, though certainly explainable by laws of Nature, 
depends on laws not yet thoroughly understood and explained. 

Even in the case, comparatively small and near to us, of the earth, 
the condition of the interior and the rate of secular cooling afford prob- 
lems which as yet wait for solution. The result of a number of careful 
experiments in mines and deep sinkings shows that the temperature, 
as we descend below the shallow superficial crust which is affected by 
the seasons, z. €., by the solar radiation, increases at the average rate of 
1° Fahrenheit for every 60 feet of depth. Thatis the average rate, 
though it varies a good deal in different localities. Now, at this rate 
we should soon reach a depth at which all known substances would be 
melted. 

But astronomical considerations, derived from the Precession of 
the Equinoxes, favor the idea that the earth is a solid and not a fluid 
body, and require us inany case toassume a rigid crust of not less than 
ninety miles in thickness. Andif the wholeearth below a thin super- 
ficial crust were in an ordinary state of fluidity from heat, it is difficult 
to see how it could do otherwise than boil, that is, establishing circulat- 
ing currents throughout its mass with disengagement of vapor, in 
which case the surface crust must be very soon broken up and melted 
down, just as the superficial crust of a red-hot stream of lava is, if an 
infusion of fresh lava raises the stream below to white heat, or as a thin 
film ofice would be if boiling water were poured in below it. 

All we can say is, that the laws under which matter behaves under 
conditions of heat, pressure, chemical action, and electricity so totally 
different as must prevail in the interior of the earth, and 4 fortioré in. 
that of the sun, are as yet very partially known tous. In the mean- 
time the safest course is to hold by those conclusions of geology which, 
as faras they go, depend on laws really known to us. Yor instance, 
the quantity of mud carried down in a year by the Ganges or Missis- 


eres L210 Le. dL 
sippi, isa quantity which can be calculated within certain approximate: 
limits. We can tell with certainty how much the deposit of this. 
amount of mud would raise an area, say of 100 square miles, and how 
long it would take, at this rate, to lower the area of India drained by 
the Ganges, a sufficient number of feet to give matter enough to fill up: 
the Gulf of Bengal. Andif among the older formations we find one, 
like the Wealden for instance, similar in character to that now forming 
by the Ganges, we can approximate from its thickness to the time. 
that may have been required to form it. 

In calculations of this sort there is no theory, they are based on 
positive facts, limited only by a certain possible amount of error either 
way. In short, the conclusions of geology, at any rate up to the Silu- 
rian period when the present order of things was fairly inaugurated, are. 
approximate facts and not theories, while the astronomical conclusions: 
are theories based on data so uncertain, that while in some cases they 
give results incredibly short, like that of 15 millions of years for the: 
whole past process of the formation of the solar system, in others they 
give results almost incredibly long, as in that which supposes the moon 
to have been thrown off when the earth was rotating in three hours, 
while the utmost actual retardation claimed from observation would 
require 600 millions of years to make it rotate in twenty-three hours: 
instead of twenty-four. 

To one who looks at these discussions between geologists and . 
astronomers not from the point of view of a specialist in either science, 
but from that of a dispassionate spectator, the safest course, in the 
present state of our knowledge, seems to be to assume that geology 
really proves the duration of the present order of things to have been. 
somewhere over 100 millions of years, and that astronomy gives am 
enormous though unknown time beyond in the past, and to come in the 
future, for the birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death of the solar 
system of which our earth is a small planet now passing through the 
habitab’e phase. 

So far, however, as the immediate object of this work is concerned, 
viz., the bearings of modern scientific discovery on modern thought, it. 
is not very material whether the shortest or longest possible standards. 
of time are adopted. The conclusions as to man’s position in the uni- 
verse and the historical truth or falsehood of old beliefs, are the same 
whether man has existed in astate of constant though slow progression 
for the last 50,000 years of a period of 15 millions, or for the last 500,- 
000 years of a periodof 150 millions. It is a matter of the deepest 
scientific interest to arrive at the truth, both as to the age of the solar 
system, the age of the earth as a body capable of supporting life, the 
successive orders and dates at which life actually appeared, and the 
manner and date of the appearence of the most highly organized form: 
of life endowed with new capacities for developing reason and conscience 
in the form af Man. Those who wish to prove themselves worthy of 
their great good luck in having been born in acivilized country of the 
nineteenth century, and notin Paleolithic periods, will do well to show 
that curiosity, or appetite for knowledge, which mainly distinguishes: 
the clever from the stupid and the civilized from the savage man, by 
studying the works of such writers as Lyell, Huxley, Tyndall, and 
Proctor, where they will find the questions here only briefly stated, 
developed at fuller length with the most accurate science and in the 
clearest and most attractive style. But for the moral, philosophical, 


Oo MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT, 


cand religious bearings of these discoveries on the current of modern 
thought, there is such a wide margin that it becomes almost immaterial 
whether the shortest possible or longest possible periods should be 
ultimately established. 


CHAPTER III. 
MATTER. 


HAT is the material universe composed of? Ether, Matter, and 
Energy. Etheris not actually known to us by any test of which 
the senses can take cognizance, butis a sort of mathematical substance 
which we are compelled to assume in order to account for the phenomena 
of light and heat. Light, as we have seen, radiates in all directions from 
a luminous centre, travelling at the rate of 184,000 miles per second. 
Now what is light? It is a sensation produced on the brain by some- 
thing which has been concentrated by the lens of the eye on the retina, 
and then transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain, where it sets 
‘certain molecules vibrating. What is the something which produces 
this effect? Is it a succession of minute particles, shot like rifle-bullets 
from the luminous body and impinging on the retina as on a target? 
Or is it asuccession of tiny waves breaking on the retina as the waves 
‘of the sea break on the shore? Analogy suggests the latter, for in the 
case of the sister sense, Sound, we know as a fact that the sensation is 
produced on the brain by waves of air concentrated by the ear, and 
striking on the auditory nerve. But we have a more conclusive proof. 
If one of a series of particles shot out like bullets overtakes another, 
the force of impact of the two is increased; but if one wave overtakes 
another when the crest of the pursuing wave just coincides with the 
hollow of the wave before it the effect is neutralized, and if the two are 
of equal size it will be exactly neutralized and both waves will be 
effaced. In other words, two lights will make darkness. This, there- 
fore, affords an infallible test. Jf two lights can make darkness, light 
is propagated, like sound, by waves. Now two lights do constantly 
make darkness, as is proved every day by numerous experiments. 
‘Therefore light is caused by waves. 

But to have waves there must be a medium through which the 
‘waves are propagated. Without water you could not have ocean waves; 
without air you could not have sound-waves. Waves are in fact 
nothing but the successive forms assumed by a set of particles which, 
when forced from a position of rest, tend to return to that position, and 
oscillate about it. Place a cork on the surface of a still pond, and then 
throw ina stone; what follows? Waves are propagated, which seem to 
travel outwards in circles, but if you watch the cork, you will see that it 
does not really travel outwards, but simply rises and falls in the same 
place. This is equally true of waves of sound and waves of light. But 
the velocity with which the waves travel depends on the nature of the 
medium. In a dense medium of imperfect elasticity they travel slowly, 
in a rare and elastic medium quickly. Now the velocity of a sound- 
wave in air is about 1,100 feet a second, that of the light-wave about 
184,000 miles a second, or about one million times greater, It is 
proved by mathematical calculation that, if the density of two media 


. MATTER. ! 33 


are the same, their elasticities are in proportion to the squares of the 
velocities with which a wave travels. The elasticity of ether, there- 
fore, would be a million million times greater than that of air, which, 
as we know, is measured by its power of resisting a pressure of about 
15 lbs. to the square inch. But the ether must in fact be almost infi- 
nitely rare,as wellas almost infinitely elastic, forit causes no perceptible 
retardation in the motions of the earth and planets. It must be almost 
infinitely rare also, because it permeates freely the interior of substances 
like glass and crystals, through which light-waves pass, showing that 
the atoms or ultimate particles of which these substances are composed, 
minute as they are, must be floating in ether like buoys floating on water 
or balloons in the air. 

The dimensions of the light-waves which travel through this ether at 
the rate of 184,000 miles a second, can be accurately measured by 
strict mathematical calculations, depending mainly on the phenomena 
of interferences, 7.e., of the intervals required between successive waves 
for the crest of one to overtake the depression of another and thus 
make two lights produce darkness. 

These calculations are much too intricate to admit of popular 
explanation, but they are as certain as those of the Nautical Almanac, 
based on the law of gravity, which enable ships to find their way 
across the pathless ocean, and they give the following results: 


Drm enstons oF Liaut-WAVEs. 


NuMBER oF WavzEs | NUMBER OF OSCILLATIONS 
CoLoRs. 


IN OnE INCH. IN ONE SECOND. 
Red 39,000 477,000,000,000,000 
Orange 42,000 506,000,000, 000,000 
Yellow 44,000 535,000,000, 000,000 
Green 47,000 575,000,000, 000,000 
Blue 51,000 622,000, 000,000,000 
Indigo 54,000 658,000, 000,000,000 
Violet 57,000 669,000, 000,000,000 


These are the colors whose vibrations affect the brain through 
the eye with the sensation of light, and which cause the sensation of 
white light when their different vibrations reach the eye simultaneously. 
But there are waves and vibrations on each side of these limits, which 
produce different effects, the longer waves with slower oscillations 
beyond the red, though no longer causing light causing heat, while the 
shorter and quicker waves beyond the violet cause chemical action, and 
are the most active agents in photography. 

We must refer our readers to works treating specially of light for 
further details, and for an account of the vast variety of beautiful and 
interesting experiments with polarized light, colored rings, and other- 
wise, to which the theory of waves propagated through ether affords 
the key. For the present purpose it is sufficient to say that modern 
science compels us to assume, as the substratum of the material 
universe, such an ether extending everywhere, from the faintest star 
seen at a distance which requires thousands of years for its rays, travel- 
ling at the rate of 184,000 miles a second, to reach the earth, down to 
the infinitesimally small interspace between the atoms of the minutest 
matter. And throughout the whole of this enormous range law pre- 


34 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


vails, ether vibrates and has always vibrated in the same definite man- 
ner, just as air vibrates by definite laws when the strings of a piano are 
struck by the hammers. 

I pass now to the consideration of matter. 

What is matter? In the most general sense it is that which has: 
weight, or is subject to the law of gravity. The next analysis shows: 
that itis something which can exist in the three forms of solid, liquid,, 
or gas, according to the amount of heat. Diminish heat, and the parti- 
cles approach closer and are linked together by mutual attraction, so as. 
not to be readily parted; this is asolid.. Increase the heat up to a cer- 
tain point, and the particles recede until their mutual attractions in the 
interior of the mass neutralize one another, so that the particles can 
move freely, though still held together as a mass by the sum of all these 
attractions acting as if concentrated at the centre of gravity; this is the 
liquid state. Increase the heat still more, and the particles separate 
until they get beyond the sphere of their mutual attraction and tend to: 
dart off into space, unless confined by some surface on which they exert, 
pressure; this is a gas. 

_ The most familiar instance of this is afforded by water, which, as 
we all know, exists in the three forms of ice, water, and vapor or steam, 
according to the dose of heat which has been incorporated with it. 

Pursuing our inquiry further, the next great fact in regard to mat- 
ter is that it is notall uniform. While most of the common forms with 
which we are conversant are made up of mixed materials, which can be 
taken to pieces and shown separately, there are, asat present ascer- 
tained, some seventy-one substances which defy chemical analysis to 
decompose them, and must therefore be taken as elementary substances. 
A great majority of these consist of substances existing in minute quan- 
tities, and hardly known outside the laboratories of chemists. 

The world of matter, as known to the senses, is mainly composed. 
of combinations, more or less complex, of a few elements. Thus, water 
is a compound of two simple gases, oxygen and hydrogen; air, of oxy- 
gen and nitrogen; the solid framework of the earth, mainly of combina- 
tions of oxygen with carbon, calcium, aluminum, silicon, and a few other 
bases; salt, of chlorine and sodium; the vegetable world directly and the 
animal world indirectly, mainly of complex combinations of oxygen, 
hydrogen, and nitrogen with carbon, and with smaller quantities of 
silicon, sulphur, potassium, sodium, and phosphorus. The ordinary 
metals, such as iron, gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, mercury, zinc, nearly 
complete the list of what may be called ordinary elements. 

Now let us push our analysis a step further, Howis matter made 
up of these elements? Up to and beyond the furthest point visible by 
aid of the microscope, matter is divisible. We can break a crystal into 
fragments, or divide a drop into drops, until they cease to be visible, 
though still retaining all the properties of the original substance. Can 
we carry on this process indefinitely, and is matter composed of some- 
thing that can be divided and subdivided into fractional parts ad infini- 
tum? The answer is, No, it consists of ultimate but still definite par- 
ticles which cannot be further subdivided. How is this known? 
Because we find by experience that substances will only combine in cer- 
tain definite proportions either of weight or measure. For instance, 
in forming water exactly eight grains by weight of oxygen combine 
with exactly one grain of hydrogen, and if there isany excess or frac- 
tional part of either gas, it remains over in its original form uncombined. 


MATTER. 35 


In like manner, matter in the form of gas always combines with other 
matter inthe same form by volumes which beara definite and very 
simple proportion toeach other, and the compound formed bears a 
definite and very simple ratio to the sum of the volumes of the combin- 
ing gases. Thus two volumes of hydrogen combine with one of oxygen 
to form two volumes of water in the state of vapor. 

From these facts certain inferences can be drawn. In the first 
place it is clear that matter really does consist of minute particles, 
which do not touch and form a continuous solid but are separated by 
intervals which increase with increase of temperature. This is evident 
from the fact that we can pour a second or third gas into a space 
already occupied by a first one. Hach gas occupies the enclosed space 
just as if there were no other gas present, and exerts its own proper 
pressure on the containing vessel, so that the total pressure on it is 
exactly the sum of the partial pressures. Itis easy to see what this 
means. If a second regiment can be marched into a limited space of 
ground on which a first regiment is already drawn up, it is evident 
that the first regiment must be drawn up in loose order, 7.e., the 
soldier-units of which itis composed must stand so far apart that 
other soldier-units can find room between them without disturbing the 
formation. But the effect will be that the fire from the front will be 
increased, as for instance if a soldier of the second regiment, armed 
with a six-shooter repeating rifle, takes his stand between two soldiers 
of the first regiment armed with single-barrelled rifles, the effective 
fire will be increased in the ratio of 8 to 2. And this is precisely what 
is meant by the statement that the pressure of two gases in the same 
space is the sum of the separate pressures of each. It is clearly 
established that the pressure of a gas on a containing surface is caused 
by the bombarding to which it is subjected from the impacts of an 
almost infinite number of these almost infinitely small atoms, which, 
when let loose from the mutual attractions which hold them together 
in the solid and fluid state, dart about in all directions, colliding with 
one another and rebounding, like a set of little billiard-balls gone mad, 
and producing a certain average resultant of momentum outwards. 
which is called pressure. 

Another simile may help us to conceive how the indivisibility of 
atoms is inferred from the fact that they only combine in definite pro- 
portions. Suppose a number of gentlemen and ladies promenading 
promiscuously in aroom. The band strikes up a waltz, and they at. 
once proceed to group themselves in couples rotating with rhythmical 
motion in definite orbits. Clearly, if there are more ladies than gen- 
tlemen, some of them will be left without partners. So, if instead of 
a waltz it were a threesome reel, in which each gentleman led out two 
ladies, there must be exactly twice as many ladies as gentlemen for all 
to join in the dance. Butif a gentleman could be cut up into frac- 
tional parts, and each fraction developed into a dancing gentleman, as 
primitive cells split up and produce fresh cells, it would not matter 
how many ladies there were, as each could be provided with a partner. 
Now this is strictly analogous to what occurs in chemical combination. 
Water is formed by each gentleman atom of oxygen taking out a lady 
atom of hydrogen in each hand, and the sets thus formed commence 
to dance threesome reels in definite time and measure, any surplus 
oxygen or hydrogen.atoms beingyleft out in the cold. Wonderful as 
it may appear, science enables us not only to say of these inconceivably 


36 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


minute atoms that they have a real existence, but to count and weigh 
them. This fact has been accomplished by mathematical calculations 
based on laws which have been ascertained by a long series of experi- 
ments on the constitution of gases. 

It is found that all substances, when in the form of gas, conform 
to three laws: 

1. Their volume 1s inversely proportional to the pressure to which 
they are subjected. 

2. Their volume is directly proportional to the temperature. 

3. At the same pressure and temperature all gases have the same 
number of molecules in the same volume. 

From the last law it is obvious that if equal volumes of two gases 
are of different weight, the cause must be that the molecules of the 
one are heavier than those of the other. This enables us to express 
the weight of the molecule of any other gas in some multiple of the 
unit afforded by the weight of the molecule of the lightest gas, which 
is hydrogen. Thus, the density of watery vapor being nine times that 
of hydrogen, we infer that the molecule of water weighs nine times as 
much as the molecule of hydrogen, and that of oxygen being eight 
times greater, we infer that the oxygen molecule is eight times heavier 
than that of hydrogen. 

These weights are checked by the other law which has been stated, 
that chemical combination between different substances always takes 
place in certain definite proportions. Thus, whenever in a chemical 
process the original substances or the product are or might exist 
in the state of gas, it is always found that the definite proportions 
observed in the chemical process are either the proportions of the 
densities of the respective gases or some simple multiple of these 
proportions. Thus, the weight of hydrogen being 2, which combines 
with a weight of oxygen equal to 16 to form a weight of watery vapor 
equal to 18, the density of the latter is to that of hydrogen as 9 to 1, 
4.€., a8 18 to 2. 

But to get to the bottom of the matter we must go a step further, 
and as we have decomposed substances into molecules, we must take 
the molecules themselves to pieces and see what they are made of. 
The molecule is the ultimate particle into which any substance can be 
divided retaining its own peculiar qualities. A molecule of water is 
as tr ruly water as a drop or a tumblerful. But when chemical decom- 
position takes place, instead of the molecule « of water we have molecules 
of two entirely different substances, oxygen ‘and hydrogen. Nothing 
can well be more unlike than the product water and the component 
parts of which it is made up. Water is a fluid, oxygen a gas; water 
extinguishes fire, oxygen creates it. Water is a harmless drink, oxy- 
gen the base of the most corrosive acids. It is evident that the water- 
molecule is a composite, and that its qualities depend, not on the 
essential qualities of the atoms which have combined to make it, but 
on the manner of the combination, and the new modes of action into 
which these atoms have been forced. In his native war-paint oxygen 
is a furious savage; with a hydrogen atom in each hand heisa polished 
gentleman. 

Our theory, therefore, leads beyond molecules to atoms, and we 
‘have to consider these particles of a still smaller order than molecules, 
as the ultimate indivisible units of matter of which we have been in 
search. And even these we must conceive of as corks, as it were, float- 


ge  MMAT DLR, 37 


ing in ap ocean of ether, causing waves in it by: their own proper 
movements, and agitated by- all the successive waves which vibrate 
through this ether-ocean in the form of light and heat. 

Working on these data, a variety of refined mathematical calcula- 
tions made by Clausius, Clark Maxwell, Sir W. Thomson, and other 
eminent mathematicians, have given us approximate figures for the 
actual size, weight, and velocities of atoms and molecules. The results 
are truly marvellous. A millimetre is the one thousandth part of a 
metre, or roughly one twenty-fifth of an inch. The magnitudes with 
which we have to deal are all of an order where the standard of 
measurement is expressed. by the millionth part of a millimetre. The 
volume of a molecule of air is only a small fraction of that of a cube 
whose side would be the millionth of amillimetre. <A cubic centimetre, 
or say a cube whose side is between one-third and one-half of an inch, 
contains 21,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules. The number of 
impacts received by each molecule of air during one second will be 
4,700 millions. The distance traversed between each impact averages 
95 millionths of a millimetre. 

It may assist in forming some conception of these almost infinitely 
small magnitudes, to quote an illustration given by Sir W. Thomson as 
the result of mathematical calculation. Suppose a drop of water were 
magnified so as to appear of the size of the earth or with a diameter of 
8,000 miles, the atoms of which it is composed, magnified on the same 
scale, would appear of a size intermediate between that of a rifle-bullet. 
and of a cricket-ball. 

These figures show that space and magnitude extend beyond the 
standards of ordinary human sense, such as miles, feet, and inches, as 
far downwards into the region of the infinitely small as they do 
upwards into that of the infinitely great. 

And throughout the whole of this enormous range law prevails. 
The same law of gravity gives weight to molecules and atoms, makes 
an apple fall to the ground, and causes double stars to revolve round 
their centre of gravity in elliptic orbits. The law of polarity which 
converts iron-filings into small magnets under the influence of a 
permanent magnet or electric current, animates the smallest atom. 
Atoms arrange themselves into molecules, and molecules into crystals, 
very much as magnetized iron-filngs arrange themselves into regular 
curves. And the great law seems to prevail universally throughout 
the material, as it does also throughout the moral world, that you can- 
not have a North without a South Pole, a positive without a negative, 
a right without a wrong; and that error consists mainly in what the 
poet calls “the falsehood of extremes’—that is, in allowing the attrac- 
tion of one pole, or of one opinion, so to absorb us as to take no 
account of its opposite. 

The universal prevalence of law has received wonderful confirma- 
tion of late years from the discovery made by the spectroscope that the 
sun, the planets, and the remotest stars are all composed of matter 
identical with that into which chemical analysis has resolved the constit- 
uent matter of the earth. This has been proved in the following way: 

Ifabeam of light is admitted into a darkened room through a 
small hole or narrow slit, and a triangular piece of glass, called a prism, 
is interposed in its path, the image thrown on a screen is a rainbow- 
tinted streak, intersected by numerous fine dark lines, which is called 
aspectrum. If, instead of solar light, light from other luminous sources 


38 MODERIT SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


is similarly treated, itis found that all elementary substances have 
their peculiar spectra. Light from solid or liquid substances gives a 
continuous spectrum, light from gases or glowing vapors givesa spec- 
trum of bright lines separated from each other, but always in definite 
positions according to the nature of the substance. Thenext great step 
in the discovery was that these bright lines become. dark lines when a 
light of greater intensity, coming from a solid nucleus, is transmitted 
through an atmosphere of such gases or vapors. We can thus photo- 
graph the spectrum of glowing hydrogen, sodium, iron, or other sub- 
stances, and placing it below a photograph of a solar or stellar spec- 
trum, seeif any of the dark lines of the latter correspond with the 
bright lines of the former. If they do we may be certain that these 
substances actually exist in thesun or star. - It is, in fact, just the same 
thing as if we had been able to bring down a jar full of thesolar or 
stellar matter and analyze it in our laboratories. 

It is difficult to convey any adequate description of these grand 
discoveries made by the new science of Spectroscopy without referring 
to special works on the subject; but it may be possible to give some 
general idea of the principles on which they are based. 

Light consists of waves propagated through ether. These waves 
are started by the vibrations of the ultimate particles of matter, which, 
whether in the simplest form of atoms, in the more complex form of 
molecules, or in the still more complex form of compound molecules, 
have their own peculiar and distinct vibrations. These vibrations are 
increased, diminished, or otherwise modified by vibrations of heat and 
by the collisions which occur between the particles from their own 
proper motions. Ifwe take the simplest case, that of matter in the 
form ofa gas or vapor composed of single atoms, at a temperature just 
sufficient to become luminous and at a pressure small enough to keep 
the atoms widely apart, the vibrations are allof one sort, viz. that 
peculiar to the elementary substance to which they belong, and one set 
of waves only is propagated by them through the ether. The spec- 
trum, therefore, of such a gas isa single line of light, in the definite 
position which is due to its refrangibility, 7.e., to the velocity of the 
particular wave of light which the particular vibration of those particu- 
lar atoms is able to propagate. 

When pressure is increased so that the particles are brought closer 
together, their vibrations made more energetic and their collisions 
more frequent, more waves, and waves of different qualities are started, 
and more lines appear in the spectrum and the lines widen out, until at 
length when the gas becomes very dense, some of the lines overlap and 
an approach is made towards a continuous spectrum. Finally, 
when the particles are brought so near together that the substance 
assumes a fluid or solid state, the number of wave-producing vibrations 
becomes so great that a complete system of different liight-waves is 
propagated, and the lines of the spectrum are multiplied until they 
coalesce and form a continuous band of rainbow-tinted light. If the 
particles of the gas, instead of being single atoms, are more complex, 
as molecules or compound molecules, the vibrations are more complex 
and the different resulting light-waves more numerous, so that the lines 
in the spectrum are more numerous, and in some cases they coalesce 
so as to form shaded bands, or what are called fluted lines, instead of 
simple lines. 

-Moreover, whatever light-waves are originated by the vibrations 


* MATTER. 39 


of the particles of a gas are absorbed into those vibrations and extin- 
guished, if they originate from the vibrations of some more energetic 
particles of another substance outside of it, whose light-waves, travel- 
ling along the ether, pass through the gas, and are thus shown as dark 
lines in the spectrum of the other source of light. 

We can now understand how the assertion is justified that we can 
analyze the composition of the sun and stars as certainly as if we had a 
jar full of their substance to analyze in our laboratory. The first glance 
at a spectrum tells us whether the luminous source is solid, fiuid, or 
gaseous. If its spectrum is continuous it is solid or fluid; we know this 
for certain, but can tell nothing more. Butif it consists of bright lines, 
we know that it comes direct from matter in the form of luminous gas, 
and knowing from experiments in the laboratory the exact colors and 
situations of the lines formed by the different elements of which earthly 
matter is composed, we can see whether the lines in the spectra of 
heavenly matter do or do not correspond with any of them. If bright 
lines correspond we are sure that the substances correspond, both as to 
their elementary atoms and their condition as glowing gas. If dark 
lines in the spectrum of the heavenly body correspond with bright lines 
in that of a known earthly substance, we are certain that the substances 
are the same and in the same state of gas, but that the solar or stellar 
spectrum proceeds from an intensely heated interior solid or fluid 
nucleus, whose waves have passed through an outer envelope or atmos- 
phere of this gas. 

Applying these principles, although the science is still in its infancy 
and many interesting discoveries remain to be made, this grand discov- 
ery has become an axiomatic fact—Matter is alike everywhere. The 
light of stars up to the extreme boundary of the visible universe, is com- 
posed mainly of glowing hydrogen, the same identical hydrogen as we 
get by decomposing water by a voltaic battery. 

Of the 71 elementary substances of earthly matter enumerated by 
chemists, 9 may be considered as doubtful or existing only in exces- 
sively minute quantities. Of the remaining 62, 22 are known certainly 
to exist in the sun’s atmosphere, 10 more can probably be traced there, 
and there are only 6 as to which, in the present state of our knowledge, 
there is negative evidence that they are not present. The elements 
whose presence is proved comprise many of those which are most com- 
mon in the composition of the earth, as hydrogen, iron, lead, calcium, 
aluminium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, etc.; and if others, such as 
oxygen, carbon, and chlorine have not yet been found, good reasons 
may be assigned why they may not exist in a state likely to give recog- 
nizable spectrum-lines. The main fact is firmly established that mat- 
ter isthe same throughout all space, from the minutest atom to the 
remotest star. . 

Thus far we have been treating of matter only, and of force 
and motion but incidentally. These, however, are equally essential 
components of the phenomena of the universe. What is force? In the 
last analysis it is the unknown cause which we assume for motion, or 
the term in which we sum up whatever produces or tends to produce 
it. The idea of force, like so many other of our ideas, is taken from 
our own sensations. If we lift a weight or bend a bow, we are 
conscious of doing so by an effort. Something which we call will 
produces a motion in the molecules of the brain, which is transmitted 
by the nerves to the muscles, where it liberates a certain amount of 


4) MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGET. 


energy stored up by the chemical composition and decomposition of 
the atoms of food which we consume. This contracts the muscle, and 
the force of its contraction, transmitted by a system of pulleys and. 
levers to the hand, lifts the weight. If we let go the weight it falls, 
- and the force which lifted it reappears in the force with which it. 
strikes thé ground. If we do not let go the weight but place it on a 
support at the height to which we have raised it, it does not fall, no 
motion ensues, but the lifting force remains stored up in a tendency 
to motion, and can be made to reappear as motion at any time by 
withdrawing the support, when the weight will fall. It is evident, 
therefore, that force may exist in two forms, either as actually causing 
motion or as causing a tendency to motion. 

In this generalized form it has been agreed to call it energy, as 
less liable to be obscured by the ordinary impressions attached to the: 
word force, which are mainly derived from experiences of actual 
motion cognizable by the senses. We speak, therefore, of energy as 
of something which is the basis or primum mobile of all motion or 
tendency to motion, whether it be in the grosser forms of gravity and 
mechanical work, or in the subtler forms of moleculer and atomic 
motions causing the phenomena of heat, light, electricity, magnetism, 
and chemical action. This energy may exist either in the form of 
actual motion, when it is called energy of motion, or in that of ten- 
dency to motion, when it is called energy of position. Thus the bent. 
bow has energy of position which, when the string is let go, is at once: 
converted into energy of motion in the flight of the arrow. 

Respecting this energy modern science has arrived at this grand 
generalization, that it is one and the same in all its different manifes- 
tations, and can neither be created nor destroyed, so that all these 
varied manifestations are mere transformations of the same primitive 
energy from one form to another. This is what is meant by the prin- 
ciple of the “Conservation of Energy.” 

It was arrived at in this way. Speaking roughly it has long been: 
known that heat could generate mechanical power, as seen in the 
steam-engine; and conversely that mechanical power could generate 
heat, as is seen when a sailor, in a chill north-easter, claps his arms. 
together on his breast to warm himself. But it was reserved for Dr. 
Joule to give this fact the scientific precision of a natural law, by 
actually measuring the amount of heat that was added toa given 
weight of water by a given expenditure of mechanical power, and 
conversely the amount of mechanical work that could be got from a 
given expenditure of heat. 

A vast number of carefully-conducted experiments have led to the 
conclusion that if a kilogramme be allowed to fall through 424 metres. 
and its motion be then suddenly stopped, sufficient heat will be 
generated to raise the temperature of one kilogramme of water by 1° 
Centigrade; and conversely this amount of heat would be sufficient to 
raise one kilogramme to a height of 424 metres. 

If, therefore, we take as our unit of work that of raising one 
kilogramme one metre, and as our unit of heat that necessary to raise: 
one kilogramme, of water 1° Centigrade, we may express the propor- 
tion of heat to work by saying that one unit of heat is equal to 424 
units of work; or, as it is sometimes expressed, that the number 424 
is the mechanical equivalent of heat. 

But the question may be asked, what does this mean, how can. 


® MATTER. 41 


mechanical work be really transformed into heat or vice versd? The: 
answer is, the energy which was supplied by chemical action to the 
muscles of the man or horse, or to the water converted into steam by 
combustion of coal, which originated the mechanical work, was first 
transformed into its equivalent amount of mechanical energy of 
motion, and then, when that motion was arrested, was transformed 
into heat, which is simply the same energy transformed into increased 
molecular motion. 

If we wish to carry our inquiry a step further back and ask where 
the original energy came from which has undergone these transforma- 
tions, the answer must be, mainly from the sun. The sun’s rays, acting 
on the chlorophyl or green matter of the plants of the coal era, tore 
asunder the atoms of carbon and oxygen which formed the carbonic 
acid in the atmosphere, and locked up a store of energy in the form of 
carbon in the coal which is burned to produce the steam. In like 
manner it stored up the energy in the form of carbon in the vegetable 
products which, either directly, or indirectly after having passed. 
through the body of some animal, supplied the food, whose slow com- 
bustion in the man or horse supplied the energy which did the work. 

But where did the energy come from which the sun has been 
pouring forth for countless ages in the form of light and heat, and of’ 
which our earth only intercepts the minutest portion? This is a mys- 
tery not yet completely solved, but one real cause we can see, which 
has certainly operated and perhaps been the only one, viz., the mechan- 
ical energy of the condensation by gravity of the atoms which originally 
formed the nebulous matter out of which the sun was made. If we 
ask how came the atoms into existence endowed with this marvellous 
energy, we have reached the furthest bounds of human knowledge, 
and can only reply in the words of the poet: ‘Behind the veil, behind 
the veil.” 

We can only form metaphysical conceptions, or I might rather 
call them the vaguest guesses. One is, that they were created and 
endowed with their elementary properties by an all-wise and all- 
powerful Creator. This is Theism. 

Another, that thought is the only reaiity, and that all the phenom-. 
ena of the universe are thoughts or ideas of one universal, all-pervad-. 
ing Mind. This is Pantheism. 

Or again, we may frankly acknowledge that the real essence and 
origin of things are “behind the veil,” and not knowable or even 
conceivable by any faculties with which the human mind is endowed 
in its present state of existence. This is Agnosticism. 

There is one other conception, of which we may certainly say 
that it is not true—that is Atheism. No one with the least knowl- 
edge of science can maintain that it can ever be demonstrated that 
everything in the universe exists of itself and never had a Creator. 

But these speculations lead us into the misty regions where, like. 
Milton’s devils, “‘we find no end in wandering mazes lost.” Let us. 
return to the solid ground of fact, on which alone the human mind 
can stand firmly, and like Anteeus gather fresh vigor every time it 
touches it for further efforts to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. 
and extend the domain of Cosmos over Chaos. 

The transformation of energy which we have seen to exist in the 
case of mechanical work and heat, is not confined to those two cases. 
only, but is 2 universal law applicah'e to all actions and arrangements. 


42 MODERN SCIENCE AND MCDERN THOUGAHT. 


of matter which involve motions of atoms, molecules, or masses, and 
therefore imply the existence of energy. In heat we have had an 
example of energy exerted in molecular motion and molecular separa- 
tion. In chemical action we have energy exerted in the separation of 
-atoms, severing them from old combinations and mutual attractions, 
and bringing them within the sphere of new ones. In electricity, and 
magnetism which is another form of electricity, we have energy of 
position which manifests itself in electrical separation, by which matter 
becomes charged with two opposite energies, positive and negative, 
which accumulate at separate poles, or on separate surfaces, with 
an amount of tension which may be reconverted into the original 
amount of energy of motion when the spark, passing between them, 
restores their electrical equilibrium. Of this we have an example in 
the ordinary electrical machine, where the original energy comes from 
the mechanical force which turns the handle, and is given back when 
‘the electric spark brings things back to their original state. 

We have also energy of motion, when instead of electrical separa- 
tion and tension we have a flow or current of electricity producing the 
effect of the electric spark in a slow, quiet, and continuous manner. 
‘Thus, in the voltaic battery, the free energy created by the difference 
of chemical action of an acid on plates of different metals, is trans- 
formed into a current which charges two poles with opposite elec- 
tricities, and when the poles are brought together and the circuit is 
closed, flows through it in a continuous current. This current is 
an energetic agent which produces various effects. It deflects the 
magnetic needle, as is seen in the electric telegraph. It creates 
magnetism, as is seen when the poles of the battery are connected 
by a wire wrapped round and round a cylinder of soft iron, so as to 
‘make the current circulate at right angles to the axis formed by the 
cylinder. In fact, all magnetism may be consided as the summing up 
at the two opposite extremities or poles of an axis, of the effects of 
electric currents circulating round it; as, for instance, the earth is a 
‘great magnet because currents caused by the action of the sun circu- 
late round it nearly parallel to the equator. Electric currents further 
‘show their energy by attracting and repelling one another, those 
flowing in the same direction attracting, and those in opposite direc- 
tions repelling, the same effect showing itself in magnets, which are 
in substance collections of circular currents flowing from right to left 
or left to right according as they are positive or negative. Again, 
currents produce an effect by inducing currents in other bodies placed 
near them, very much as the vibrations of a tuning-fork induce vibra- 
tions and bring out a corresponding note from the strings of a piano 
or violin ready to sound it. When a coil of wire is connected with a 
battery and a current passes through it, if itis brought near to another 
isolated coil it induces a current in an opposite direction, which, when 
it recedes from it, is changed into a current in the same direction. 

These principles are illustrated by the ordinary dynamo, by which 
the energy of mechanical work exerted in making magnets revolve in 
presence of currents, and by various devices accumulating electric 
energy, is made available either for doing other mechanical work, such 
as driving a wheel, or for doing molecular or atomic work by pro- 
‘ducing heat and light. 

For another transformation of the energy of electric currents is 
dnto heat, light, or chemical action. If the two poles of a battery are 


WAT TER: 4S 


connected by a thin platinum wire it will be heated to redness in a 
few seconds, the friction or resistance to the currant in passing through 
the limited section of the thin wire producing great heat. If the 
wire is thicker heat will equally be produced, but more slowly. 

If the poles of the battery are made of carbon, or some substance 
the particles of which remain solid during intense heat, when they are 
brought nearly together the current will be completed by an are of 
intensely brilliant light, and the carbon will slowly burn away. This 
is the electric light so commonly used when great illuminating power 
is wanted. . 

Again, the electric current may employ its energy in effecting 
chemical action. If the poles of a battery, instead of being brought 
together, are plunged into a vessel of water, decomposition will begin. 
Oxygen will rise in small bubbles at the positive pole, and hydrogen 
at the negative. If these two gases are collected together in the same 
vessel, and an electric current, in the intense and momentary form of 
a spark, passed through them, they will combine with explosion into 
the exact amount of water which was decomposed in their formation. 

Everywhere, therefore, we find the same law of universal applica- 
tion. Energy, like matter, cannot be created or destroyed, but only 
transformed. It is therefore, in one sense, eternal. But there is 
another point of view from which this has to be regarded. 

Mechanical work, as we have seen, can always be converted into 
heat, and heat can, under certain conditions, be reconverted into 
mechanical work; but not under all conditions. The heat must pass 
from something ata higher temperature into something ata lower. If 
the condenser of a steam-engine were always at the same temperature 
as the boiler, we should get no work out of it. Itis easy to under- 
stand how this is the case if we figure to ourselves a river running down 
into alake. If the stream is dammed up at two different levels, each 
dam, as long as there is water in it, will turna mill-wheel. But if all the 
water runs down into the lake and, owing to a dry season, there is no 
fresh supply, the wheels will stop and we can get no more work done. 
So with heat, if it all runs down to one uniform temperature it can no 
longer be made available to do work. In the case of the river, fresh 
water is supplied at the higher levels, by the sun’s energy raising it by 
evaporation from the seas to the clouds, from which it is deposited as 
rain or snow. But in the case of heat there is no such self-restoring 
process, and the tendency is always towards its dissipation; or in other 
words, towards a more uniform distribution of heat throughout all 
existing matter. The process is very slow; the original fund of high- 
temperature heat is enormous, and aslongas matter goes on condens- 
ing fresh supplies of heat are, so to speak, squeezed out of it. 

Still there is a limit to condensation, while there is no limit to the 
tendency of heat to diffuse itself from hotter to colder matter until all 
temperatures are equalized. The energy is not destroyed; it is still 
there in the same average amount of total heat, though no longer dif 
ferentiated into greater and lesser heats, and therefore no longer avail- 
able for life, motion, or any other form of transformation. This seems 
to be the case with the moon, which, being so much smaller, has sooner 
equalized its heat with surrounding space, and is apparently a burnt-out 
and dried-up cinder without air or water. And this, as far as we see, 
must be the ultimate fate of all planets, suns, and solar systems. For- 
tunately the process is extremely slow, for even our small earth has 


Sok MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


enjoyed air, water, sunshine, and all the present conditions necessary 
for life for the whole geological period, certainly from the Silurian epoch 
downwards, if not earlier, which cannot well be less than 100 millions. 
of years, and may be muchmore. Still time, even if reckoned by hun- 
dreds of millions of years, is not eternity; and as, looking through the 
telescope at nebule which appear to be condensing about central 
nuclei, we can dimly discern a beginning, so, looking at the moon and 
reasoning from established principles as to the dissipation of heat, we. 
can dimly discernan end. What we really can see is that throughout 
the whole of this enormous range of space and time law prevails; that, 
given the original atoms and energies with their original qualities, 
everything else follows ina regular and inevitable succession; and that 
the whole material universe is a clock, so perfectly constructed from the 
beginning as to require no outside interference during the time it has 
to run to keep it going with absolute correctness. 


CHAPTER IV. 
LIFE. 


HE universe is divided into two worlds—the inorganic, or world 
of dead matter; and the organic, or world of life. What is life? 
In its essence it is a state of matter in which the particles are ina 
continued state of flux, and the individual existence depends, not on 
the same particles remaining in the same definite shape, but on the 
permanence of a definite mould or form through which fresh particles 
are continually entering, forming new combinations and passing away. 
It may assist in forming a conception of this if we imagine ourselves 
to be looking at a mountain the top of which is enveloped in a driving 
mist. The mountain is dead matter, the particles of which continue 
fixed in the rocks. But the cloud form which envelops it is a mould 
into which fresh particles of vapor are continually entering and becom- 
ing visible on the windward side, and passing away and disappearing 
to leeward. If we add to this the conception that the particles do not, 
asin the case of the cloud, simply enter in and pass away without 
change, but are digested, that is, undergo chemical changes by which 
they are partly assimilated and worked up into component parts of 
the mould, and partly thrown off in new combinations, we shall arrive 
at something which is not far off the ultimate idea of what constitutes 
living matter, in its simplest form of the protoplasm, or speck of jelly- 
like substance, which is shown to be the primitive basis or raw material 
of all the more complex forms both of vegetable and animal life. 
Digestion, therefore, is the primary attribute. A crystal grows from 
without, by taking on fresh particles and building them up in regular 
layers according to fixed laws, just as the pyramids of Egypt were built 
up by laying layer upon layer.of squared stones upon surfaces formed 
of regular figures, and inclined to each other at determinate angles. 
The living plant or animal grows from within by taking supplies 
of fresh matter into its inner laboratory, where it is worked up into a 
variety of complex products needed for the existence and reproduction 
of life. After supplying these, the residue is given back in various 
forms to the inorganic world, and the final residue of all is given back 
by death, which is the ultimate end of all life 


‘ LIFE, 45 


The simplest form of life, in which it first emerges from the inor- 
ganic into the organic world, consists of protoplasm, or, as it has been 
called, the physical basis of life. Protoplasm is a colorless semi-fluid or 
jelly-like substance, which consists of albuminoid matter, or in other 
words, of a heterogeneous carbon-compound of very complex chemical 
composition. It exists in every living cell, and performs the functions 
of nutrition and reproduction, as well as of sensation and motion. In 
itssimplest form, tbat of the microscopic monera or protista, the lowest 
of living beings, we find a homogeneous structureless piece of proto- 
plasm, withoutany differentiation of parts. The monera are simple living 
globules of jelly, without even a nucleus or any sort of organ, and yet 
they perform all the essential functions of life without any different 
parts being told off for particular functions. Livery particle or mole- 
cule is of the same chemical composition and a fac-simile of the whole 
body, as in the case of a crystal. They are, therefore, the first step 
from the inorganic into the organic world, and if spontaneous genera- 
tion takes place anywhere, it is in the passage of the chemical elements 
from the simple and stable combinations of the former into the complex 
and plastic combinations of the latter. 

These monera are found principally in the sea and in great masses 
at the bottom of deep oceans, where they form a sort of living slime 
first described by Huxley in 1868, and called Bathybius. 

The next step upwards is to the cell in which the protoplasm is 
enclosed in a skin or membrane of modified protoplasm, and a nucleus, 
or denser spot, is developed in the enclosed mass. This is the primary 
element from which all the more complicated forms of life are built up. 
Each cell seems to have an independent life of its own, and a faculty of 
reproduction by splitting into fresh cells similar to itself, which multi- 
ply in geometrical progression, assimilating the elements of their sub- 
stance from the inorganic world so rapidly as to provide the requisite 
raw material for higher structures. 

The first organized living forms are extremely minute, and can only 
be recognized by powerful microscopes. A filtered infusion of hay, 
allowed to stand for two days, will swarm with living things, a number 
of which do not exceed 4) of an inch in diameter. Minute as these 
animalcula are, they are thoroughly alive. They dart about and 
digest; the smallest speck of jelly-like substance shoots out branches 
or processes to seize food, and if these come in collision with other 
substances they withdraw them. They exist in countless myriads, 
and perform a very important part in the economy of nature. They 
are the scavengers of the universe, and remove the remains of living 
matter after death, which would otherwise accumulate until they 
choked up the earth. This they do by the process of putrefaction, 
which is due mainly to the multiplication of little rod-like creatures 
known as bacteria, which work up the once living, now dead, matter 
into fresh elements, again fitted to play their part in the inorganic 
and organic worlds. 

One of the simplest of these forms is the ameeba, which is nothing 
but a naked little lump of cell-matter, or plasma, containing a nucleus; 
and yet this little speck of jelly moves freely, it shoots out tongues or 
processes and gradually draws itself up to them witha sort of wave- 
like motion; it eats and grows, and in growing reproduces itself by 
contracting in the middle and splitting up into two independent 
amoebee. 


46 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


The germs of these various animalcula swarm in the air, and carry 
seeds of infection everywhere where they find a soil fitted to receive 
them; and thus assist the survival of the fittest in the struggle of 
life, by eliminating weak and unhealthy individuals and species. Thus 
when the potato, the vine, or the silk-worm has had its constitution 
enfeebled by prolonged artificial culture, there are germs always ready 
to revenge the violation of natural laws, and bring the survivors back 
toa more healthy condition. In like manner the germs of cholera, 
typhoid, and scarlet fever, enforce the observance of sanitary principles. 

In this simple form the lowest forms of life are not yet sufficiently 
differentiated to enable us to distinguish clearly between animal and. 





AmMa@Ba, Amapa dividing into two. 


vegetable, and they have been called by some naturalists Protista, 
while others designate them as Protozoa or Protophyta, according as. 
they show more resemblance to one or the other form of life. But it 
is often so doubtful that in looking at the same organism through a 
microscope, Huxley was inclined to consider it as a plant, while Tyndall 
exclaimed that he could as soon believe that a sheep was a vegetable. 

In the next stage upwards, however, life subdivides itself into 
two great kingdoms, that of the vegetable and of the animal world. 
Alike in their general definition as contrasted with inorganic matter, 
and in their common origin from an embryo cell, which divides and 
subdivides until ccll-aggregates are formed, from which the living 
form is built up by a process of evolution, the plant differs from the 
animal in this: that the former feeds directly on inorganic matter, 
while the latter can only feed on it indirectly, after it has been manu- 
factured by the plant into vegetable substance. 

This is universally true, for if we dine on beef, we dine practically ; 
on the grass which the ox ate; that is, on the carbon, oxygen, hydro- 
gen, and other simple elements which the grass, under the stimulus 
of light and sunshine, manufactured into complex compounds; and 
which the ox again, by a second process, manufactured from these 
compounds into others still more complex, and more easily assimilated 
by us in the process of digestion. But in no case can we dine, as the 
plant does, on the simple elements, and thrive on a diet of air and 
water, witha small admixture of nitrate of ammonia, and of phosphates, 
sulphates and chlorides, of afew primitive metals. Vegetable life, 
therefore, is the producer, and animal life the consumer, of the organic 
world. 

Practically the plant derives most of its substance from the 
carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere, which green leaves under the 
stimulus of light and heat have the faculty of decomposing, and 


‘ LIFE, AT 


abstract the carbon giving out the oxygen; while the animal, by a. 
reverse process, burns up the compounds manufactured by the plant, 
principally out of this carbon, by the oxygen obtained from the air 
by the process of respiration, exhaling the surplus carbon in the form 
of carbonic acid gas. ” 

The balancing effect of these two processes may be seen in any” 
aquarium, where animals and vegetables live together in water which: 
is kept pure, while it would become stagnant and poisonous in a few 
hours, if one of the two forms of life were removed. All that the: 
animal requires therefore for its existence, materials with which to 
build up its frame and supply waste; heat with which to maintain its 
circulating fluids and other substances at a proper temperature; 
motive power or energy to enable it to move, feel, and in the case of 
man to think; are all proceeds of the slow combustion of materiale 
derived from the vegetable world in the oxygen breathed from the 
air, just as the work done by a steam-engine is the product of a similar 
combustion, or chemical combination of the oxygen of the air with the 
coal shovelled into the fire-box. These distinctions, however, between. 
animals and vegetables are not quite absolute, for, even in the more 
highly-organized forms of life, there is a border-land where some plants: 
seem to perform the functions of animals, asin those which catch and: 
consume flies and eat and digest pieces of raw meat. 

Those who wish to pursue this interesting subject further will do. 
well to read the Chapter on Living Matter in Huxley’s ‘“Physiography,” 
where they will find it more fully explained, with the inimitable clear- 
ness which characterizes all the writings of an author who is at the 
same time one of the first scientific authorities and one of the greatest. 
masters of English prose. But my present object is not to write a 
scientific treatise, but shortly to sum up the ascertained results of 
modern science, with a view to their bearings on modern thought; and. 
from this point of view the immediate question is, how far law, which 
has been shown to prevail universally throughout space, time, and 
inorganic matter, can be shown to prevail equally throughout the. 
world of life. 

Up to acertain point this admits of positive proof. It is as 
certain that all individual life, from the most elementary protoplasm 
up to the highest organism Man, originates in a minute or embryo 
cell, as it is that oxygen and hydrogen combined in certain proportions 
make water. Butif we try to go back one step further, behind the 
cell, we are stopped. In the inorganic world we can reason our way 
beyond the microscopic matter to the molecule, and from the molecule. 
to the atom, and are only arrested when we come to the ultimate form 
of matter, and of energy, out of which the universe is built up. But, 
in the case of life, we are stopped two steps short of this, and cannot 
tell how the cell containing the germ of life is built up out of the 
simpler elements. 

Many attempts have been made to bridge over this gulf, and show 
how life may originate in chemical compounds, but hitherto without. 
success. Experiments have been made which, for a time, seemed to. 
show that spontaneous generation was a scientific fact, z.e., that the 
lowest forms of life, such as bacteria and ameceba, really did originate. 
in infusions containing no germs of life; but they have been met by 
counter experiments confirming Harvey's dictum, “Omne animal ex ~~ 
ovo,” or all life proceeds from antecedent germs of life, and the verdict. ° 


AS MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGAHT. 


of the best authorities, such as Pasteur, Tyndall, and Huxley is, that 
spontaneous generation has been “defeated along the whole line.” 
This verdict is perhaps too unqualified, for it certainly appears that, 
on the assumption with which both sides started, that all organic 
life was destroyed by exposure to a heat of 212°, or the boiling-point 
of water, the advocates of spontaneous generation had the best of it, 
as low forms of life did appear in infusions which had been exposed 
to this heat, and then hermetically sealed, so as to prevent any germs 
from entering. But it was replied that, as a hard pea takes more 
boiling than a soft one, it might very well be that heat sufficient to 
destroy life in any moist organism of sufficient size to be seen by the 
microscope, might not destroy the germinating power of ultra-micro- 
scopic germs ina very dry state. And this position seems to have 
been confirmed by various experiments, showing that such ultra- 
microscopic germs really do exist, and are given forth in the last life 
stage of the bacteria which cause putrefaction; and that if they are 
absent or destroyed by repeated applications of heat, infusions will 
keep sweet for ever in optically pure air. 

Above all, the germ theory has received confirmation from the 
brilliant practical results to which it has led in the hands of Pasteur, 
enabling him to detect, and toa great extent eradicate, the causes 
which had led to the oidium of the vine and the pebrine of the silk- 
worm, thereby saving losses of millions to the industries of France. 
‘The germ theory has also led to important results in medical science, 
and is pointing towards the possibility of combating the most fatal 
diseases by processes analogous to that by which vaccination has 
almost freed the human race from the scourge of small-pox. 

On the whole, therefore, we must be content to accept a verdict 
of “Not proven” in the case of spontaneous generation, and admit 
that as regards the first origin of life, science fails us, and there is at 
‘present no known law that will account for it. 

Should spontaneous generation ever be proved to be a fact, it 
will doubtless be in creating living protoplasm from inorganic ele- 
ments at its earliest stage, before it has been differentiated even into 
the primitive form of a nucleated cell or that of an ameba. This is 
‘what the doctrine of evolution w6uld lead us to expect, for it would 
be in contradiction to it to suppose that the starting-point could be 
‘interpolated at any stage subsequent to the lowest. It may be also 
that this step could only be made under conditions of heat, pressure, 
and otherwise, which existed in the earlier stage of the earth’s existence, 
but have long since passed away. 

This, however, is only a small part of the difficulty we have to 
encounter in reducing life to law. 

These primeval embyro cells, like as they are in appearance, 
contain within them the germs of an almost infinite diversity of evolu- 
tions, each running its separate course distinct from the others. The 
world of life is not one and uniform, but consists of a vast variety of 
different species, from the speck of protoplasm up to the forest tree, 
and from the humble amceba up to man, each one, at any rate within 
long intervals of time, breeding true and keeping to its own separate 
and peculiar path along the line of evolution. 

The first germ, or nucleated cell, of a bacteria develops into other 
bacteria and nothing else, that of a coral into corals, of an oak into 
oaks, of an elephat into elephants, of aman into man. In the latter 


LIFE. 49 


case we can trace the embryo.in its various stages of growth through 
forms having a certain analogy to those of the fish, the reptile, and 
the lower mammals, until it finally takes that of the human infant. 
But we have no experience of a fish, a frog, or a dog, being ever born 
of human parents, or of any of the lower animals ever producing 
anything resembling a man. 

How can this be explained? Naturally the first attempt at explana- 
tion was by miracle. At a time when everything was explained by 
miracle, when all unusnal occurrences were attributed to supernatural 
agency, and men lived in an atmosphere of providential interferences, 
witchcraft, magic, and all sorts of divine and diabolic agencies, nothing 
seemed easier than to say the beasts of the field, the birds of the aiz, 
and the fishes of the sea are all distinct after their kind, because Ged 
created them so. 

But as the supernatural faded away and disappeared in other 
departments where it had so long reigned supreme, and science began 
to classify, arrange, and accumulate facts as they really are, it becaine 
more and more difficult, or rather impossible, to accept this simple 
explanation. The very first step destroyed the validity of all the tra- 
ditional myths which described the origin of life from one simultaneous 
act of creation at a single centre. The earth is divided into separate 
zoological provinces, each with its own peculiar animal and vegetable 
world. The kangaroo, for instance, is foundin Australia and there 
only. Byno possibility could the aboriginal kangaroo have jumped at 
one bound from Mount Ararat to Australia, leaving no trace of his 
passage in any intermediate district. This isolation of life in separate 
provinces applies so rigidly, that we may sum it up by saying generally 
that there are no forms of life common to two provinces unless where 
migration is possible, or has been possible in past geological periods. 

In islands at a distance from continents, we find common forms of 
marine life, for the sea affords a means of communication; and often 
common forms of bird, insect, and vegetable life, where they may 
have been wafted by the winds; but forms which neither in the adult 
or germ state-could swim or fly, or be transported by something which did 
swim or fly, are invariably wanting. New Zealand affords a most con- 
spicuous instance of this. Here is a large country with a soil and 
climate exceptionally well adapted to support a large amount of animal 
life of the higher orders, and yet it had absolutely no land animals 
before they were introduced by man. If special creations took place 
to replenish the earth as soon as any portion or its surface becomes fit 
to sustain it, why were there no animals in New Zealand? Or, in the 
Andaman Islands, in the Gulf of Bengal, which are as large as Ireland, 
covered with luxuriant vegetation, and within 300 miles of the coast of 
Asia, where similar jungles swarm with elephants, tigers, deer, and all 
the varied forms of mammalian life, there are no mammalia except a 
pigmy black savage anda pigmy black pig, the latter probably intro- 
duced by man. 

The sharpness of the division between zodlogical provinces is well 
illustrated by that drawn by the Straits of Lombok, where a channel, 
not twenty miles wide, separates the tauna of Asia and Australia so 
completely that there are no species of land animals, and only a few of 
birds and insects, common to the two sides of a channel not so wide 
as the Straits of Dover. 

There is no possibility of accounting for this, except by supposing 


4 


50 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


that the deep water fissure of the Strait of Lombok has existed from 
remote geological periods,and barred the migration southwards of those 
Asiatic animals, which, as long as they found dry land, migrated north- 
wards and westwards till they were stopped bythe Polar and Atlantie: 
Oceans. This difficulty of requirmg special creations for separate 
provinces is enormously enhanced if we look beyond the existing con- 
dition of things, and trace back the geological record. We must sup- 
pose separate creations for all the separate provinces of the separate 
successive formations from the Silurian upward. And the more we 
investigate the conditions of life either under existing circumstances. 
or in those of past geological epochs, the more enormously are we 
driven to multiply the number of separate creations which would be 
necessary to account for the diversity of species. We find life shading: 
off into an indefinite variety of almost imperceptible gradations 
from the highest organism, man, to the lowest, or speck of protoplasm, 
and we can draw no hard and fast line and say, up to this point life 
originated in law, and beyond it we must have recourse to miracle. 
Hither all life or none is a product of evolution acting by defined law, 
and the affirmation of law is the negation of miracle. 

Every day brings usan account of some new discovery bringing 
forms of life nearer together and bridging over intervals thought to be 
impassable. The discovery of plants living on insects, and which 
devour and digest pieces of raw meat, has added to the difficulty which 
has been long felt, in the humbler forms of life, of drawing any clear 
line of demarcation between the animal and vegetable worlds. 

Microscopic research brings to light fresh facts confounding our 
fixed ideas as to the permanence of particular modes of reproducing 
life, and: showing that the same organism may run through various 
metamorphoses in the course of its life-cycle, during some of which it 
may be sexual and in others asexual, 7.¢., it may reproduce itself alter- 
nately by the co-operation of two beings of opposite sex, and by fissure 
or budding from one being only which is of no sex. 

These, anda multitude of other similar facts, complicate enor- 
mously the problems of life and its developments, whether we attempt to 
solve it by calling in aid a perpetual series of innumerable miraculous 
interpositions, or by appealing to ordinary known laws of Nature. 

Is the latter solution possible, and can the organic world be 
reduced, as the inorganic world has been with all its mysteries and 
infinities of space, time, and matter, from chaos into cosmos, and shown 
to depend on permanent and harmonious laws? Is the world of life, 
like that of matter, a clock, so perfectly constructed from the first that. 
it goes without winding up or regulating? or is it a clock which would 
never have started going, orhaving started would soon cease to go if 
the hand ofthe watchmaker were not constantly interfering with it? 
This is the question which the celebrated Darwinian theory attempts 
to answer, of which I now proceed to give a short general outline. 

The varieties among domestic animals are obvious to every one. 
The race-horse is a very different creature from the dray-horse; the 
short-horned ox from the Guernsey cow; the greyhound from the 
Skye terrier. How has this come to pass? Evidently by man’s inter- 
vention, causing long-continued selection in breeding for certain 
objects. The English race-horse is the product of mating animals 
distinguished for speed for some fifteen or twenty generations. The 
greyhound isa similar dog-product by breeding for a longer period 


SY AF 51 


with the same object; as the Skye terrier is of selection in order to 
get a dog which can follow a fox into a cairn of rocks and fight him 
when he gets there. In all these cases it is evident that the final 
result was not attained at once, but by taking advantage of small 
accidental variations and accumulating them from one generation to 
another by the principle of heredity, which make offspring reproduce 
the qualities of their parents. | 

The most precise and scientific experiments on this power of 
integrating, or summing up, a progressive series of differentials, or 
minute differences, between successive generations, are those conducted 
by Darwin on pigeons. He has shown conclusively that all the races 
oi domestic pigeons, of which there are two or three hundred, are 
derived from one common ancestor, the wild or blue rock pigeon, and 
that the pigeon-fancier can always obtain fresh varieties in a few 
generations by careful interbreeding. Of the existing varieties many 
now differ widely from one another, both in size, appearance, and even 
in anatomical structure, so that if they were now discovered for the 
first time in a fossil state or in a new country, they would assuredly be 
classed by naturalists as separate species. 

This is the work of man; is there anything similar to it going on 
in Nature? Yes, says Darwin, there is a tendency in all life, and 
especially in the lower forms of life, to reproduce itself vastly quicker 
than the supply of food and the existence of other life can allow, and. 
the balance of existence is only preserved by the wholesale waste of 
individuals in what may be called the “struggle for life.” In this 
struggle, which goes on incessantly and on the largest scale, the 
slightest advantage must tell in the long run, and on the average, in 
selecting the few who are to survive, and such slight advantages must 
tend to accumulate from one generation to another under the law of 
heredity. The cumulative power of selection exercised by man in the 
breeding of races is therefore necessarily exercised in Nature by the 
struggle for life, and in the course of time, by the cumulation of 
advantages originally slight, small and fluctuating variations are 
hardened into large and permanent ones, and new species are formed. 

Darwin ilustrates this principle of the “struggle for life” with a. 
vast variety of instances, showing how the balance of animal and. 
vegetable life may be preserved or destroyed in the most unexpected 
manner. For instance, the fertilization of red clover is effected by 
humble-bees, and depends on their number; the number of bees in a 
given district depends mainly on the number of field-mice which destroy 
their combs and nests; the number of mice depends on the number of 
cats; and thus the presence or absence of a carnivorous animal may 
decide the question whether a particular sort of flora shall prevail over 
others or be extirpated. 

j The countless profusion with which any one species, unchecked by 
its natural foes, may multiply in a given district, is illustrated by the 
potato disease, which in a few days invades whole countries; and by 
the rabbit plague in Australia and New Zealand, where, in less than 
twenty years, the descendants of a few imported pairs have rendered. 
whole provinces useless for sheep pasture, and stoats are now being 
imported to restore the balance of life. The tendency in species. to 
produce varieties which by selection may become exaggerated and. 
fixed, is illustrated by the case of the Ancon herd of sheep. A ram 
lamb was born in Massachusetts in 1791, which had short crooked legs 


52 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


and along back like a turnspit dog. Being unable to jump over 
fences like the ordinary sheep, it was thought to possess certain 
advantages to the farmer, and the breed was established by artificial 
selection in pairing this ram with its descendants who possessed the 
same peculiarities. The introduction of the Merino superseded the 
Ancon by giving a tame sheep not given to jump fences, with a better 
fleece, and so the breed was not continued, but it is certain that it 
might have been established as a permanent variety differing from the 
ordinary sheep as much as the turnspit or Skye terrier differs from 
the ordinary dog. The tendency of Nature to variation is apparent 
in the fact that of the many hundred millions of human beings living 
on the earth, no two are precisely alike, and varieties often appear, as 
in giants and dwarfs, six-fingered or toed children, hairy and other 
families, which might doubtless be fixed and perpetuated by artificial 
or natural selection, until they became strongly marked and permanent. 

It is evident thatif the theory of development is true it excludes 
the old theory of design, or rather, it thrusts it back in the organic, as 
it has been thrust back in the inorganic world, to the first atoms or 
origins which were made so perfect as to carry within them all subse- 
quent phenomena by necessary evolution. Design and development 
lead to the same result, that of producing organs adapted for the work 
they have to do, but they lead toitin totally different ways. Develop- 
ment works from the less to the more perfect, and from the simpler to 
the more complicated, by incessant changes, small in themselves but 
constantly accumulating in the required direction. Design supposes 
that organisms were created specially on a predetermined plan, very 
much as the sewing-machine or self-binding reaper were constructed 
by their inventors. 

Until quite recently all adaptations of means to ends were con- 
sidered as evidences of design. A series of treatises was published 
some thirty years ago, for prizes left by a late Duke of Bridgewater, to 
illustrate this theme, among which one by Sir Charles Bell on the Hand 
attracted a good deal of attention. It was shown what an admirable 
machine the human hand is for the various purposes for which it is 
used, and the inference was drawn that it must have been created so 
by a designer who adapted means to ends in much the same way as is 
done by a human inventor. But more complete knowledge has dis- 
pelled this idea, and shown that the design, if there be any, must be 
placed very much farther back, and is in fact involved in the primitive 
germ from which all vertebrate life certainly, and probably all life, 
animal or vegetable, have been slowly developed. 

The human hand is in effect the last stage of a development of the 
vertebrate type, or type of life in which a series of jointed vertebree 
form a backbone, which protects a spinal cord containing the nervous 
centres, gives points of attachment for the muscles, and forms an axis 
of support for the looser tissues. Certain of these vertebree throw out 
bony spines or rays; at first, by a sort of simple process of vegetable 
growth, which formed the fins of fishes; then some of these rays dropped 
off and others coalesced into more complex forms, which made the 
rudimentary limbs of reptiles; and finally, the continued process of 
‘development fashioned them into the more perfect limbs of birds and 
mammals. In this last stage a vast variety of combinations was 
developed. Sometimes the bones of the extremities spread out, so as 
to form long fingers sugporting the feathered wings of birds and the 


z LIFE, 53 
membraneous wings of bats; sometimes they coalesced into the solid 
limbs supporting the bodies of large animals, as in the case of the horse; 
and finally, at the end of the series, they formed that marvellous instru- 
ment, the hand, as it appears in the allied genera of monkeys, apes, 
and man. 4 

Any theory of secondary design and special miraculous creation 
must evidently account for all the intermediate forms as well as for 
the final result. We must suppose not one but many thousands of 
special creations, at a vast variety of places and over a vast extent of 
time; we must take into account not the successes only, but the 
failures, where organs appear in a rudimentary form which are per- 
fectly useless, or in some cases even injurious, to the creature in 
which they are found. For instance, in the case of the so-called 
wingless birds, like the dodo of the Mauritius, and the apteryx of 
New Zealand, which are found in oceanic islands, evolution accounts 
readily for the atrophy or want of development of organs which were 
not wanted where the birds had no natural enemies and found their 
food on the ground; but why should they have been created with 
rudimentary wings, useless while they remained isolated, and insuf- 
ficient to prevent their extermination as soon as man, or any other 
natural enemy, reached the islands where they had lived secure? 

If we are to adopt the theory of design and special creation, we 
must be prepared to take Burns’ poetical fancy as a scientific truth, 
and believe that Nature had to try its “prentice hand,” and grope its 
way through repeated trials and failures from the less to the more 
perfect. Again, the theory of special creation must account not only 
for the higher organs and forms of life, but for the lower forms also. 
Are the bacteria, amcebee, and other forms of life which the microscope 
shows in a drop of water all instances of a miraculous creation? And 
still more hard to believe, is this the origin of the whole parasitic 
world of life whichis attached to and infests each its own peculiar 
form of higher life? Is the human tape-worm a product of design, or 
that wonderful parasite the trichinia, which oscillates between man 
and the pig, being capable of being born only in the muscles of the 
one, and of living only in the intestines of the other? 

These are the sort of difficulties which have led the scientific 
world, I may say universally, to abandon the idea of separate special 
creations, and to substitute for it that which has been proved to be 
true of the whole inorganic world of stars, suns, planets, and all forms 
of matter; the idea of an original creation (whatever creation may 
mean and behind which we cannot go) of ultimate atoms or germs, so 
perfect that they carried within them all the phenomena of the uni- 
verse by a necessary process of evolution. 

This is the idea to which the Darwinian theory leads up, by show- 
ing natural causes in operation which must inevitably tend to cause 
and to accumulate slight varieties, until they become large in amount 
and permanent, thus developing new races within old species, new 
. species within old families, new families within old types, and new and 
complex types from old and simple ones. 

The theory is up to a certain point undoubtedly true, and beyond 
that point in the highest degree probable, but scientific caution 
obliges us to add that it is still toa considerable extent a “theory,” 
and nota “law.” That is, it is not like the law of gravity, a demon- 
strated certainty throughout the whole universe, but a provisional law 


54 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGAT. 


which accounts for a great number of undoubted facts, and supplies a 
framework into which ‘all other similar facts, as at present ascertained, 
appear to fit with a probability not approached by any other theory, 
and which is enhanced by every fresh discovery made, and by the 
analogy of what we know to be the laws which regulate the whole 
inorganic world. 

To enable us to talk of the “Darwinian law,” and not of the 
“Darwinian theory,” we require two demonstrations: 

1. That living matter really can originate from inorganic matter. 

2. That new species really can be formed from previously. existing 

species. 

As Sey the first, we have seen that the efforts of science have 
hitherto failed to produce an instance of spontaneous generation, and 
all we can say is that it is probable that such instances have occurred in 
earlier ages of our planet, under conditions of light, heat, chemical 
action, and electricity, different from anything we can now reproduce 
in our laboratories. This, however, falls short of demonstration, and 
for the present we must be content to leave the orgin of life as one of 
the mysteries not yet brought within the domain of law. 

As regards the second point, we are further advanced towards the 
possibility of proof. But here also we are met by two difficulties. 
If we appeal to historical evidence, we are met by the fact that 
a much greater time than is embraced by any historical record 
is almost necessarily required for the dying out of any old species 
and introduction of any new one, by natural selection. Andif we 
appeal to fossil remains we are met by the imperfection of the geo- 
logical record. As to this, it must be remembered that only a very 
small portion of the earth’s surface has been explored, and of this a 
very small portion consists of ancient land surfaces or fresh water for- 
mations, where alone we can expect to meet with traces of the higher 
forms of animal life. And even these have been so imperfectly explored, 
that where we now meet with thousands and tens of thousands of un- 
doubted human remains lying almost under our feet, it is only within 
the last thirty years that their existence has ever been suspected. 
Cuvier, the greatest authority of the last generation, laid it down as an 
incontrovertible fact that neither men nor monkeys had existed in the 
fossil state, or in anything more ancient than the most superficial and 
recent deposits. We have now at least twenty specimens of fossil 
monkeys from one locality alone of the Miocene period, that of 
Pikermi, near Athens, and many thousands of human remains, at least 
into the Quaternary period and contemporary with extinct animals, 
if not earlier. We must be content, therefore, with approximate solu- 
tions pointing up to but not absolutely demonstrating the truth. 

What is a species? Speaking generally it is an assemblage of 
individuals who maintain a separate family type by breeding freely 
among themselves, and refusing to breed with other species. There 
can be no doubt that this represents what, at the first view and for a 
limited range of time, is in accordance with actual facts. The animal - 
and vegetable worlds are practically mapped out into distinct species, 
and do not present the mass of confusion which would result from 
indiscriminate cross-breeding. It is clear also that this state of things 
has lasted for a considerable time, for the paintings on Egyptian tombs 
and monuments carry us back more than 4,000 years, and show us 
the most strongly marked varieties of the human race, such as the 


LIFE. 55 


Semitic, the Egyptian, and the Negro, existing just as they do at the 
present day. They show us also such extreme varieties of the dog 
species as the greyhound and the turnspit, then in existence; and the 
skeletons of animals such as the ox, cat, and crocodile, which have 
been preserved as mummies, show no appreciable difference from those 
of their modern descendants. 

When we come to look closely, however, into the matter, our 
faith in this absolute rule of the entire independence of species is 
greatly modified. In the lower grades of life we see everywhere 
species shading off into one another by insensible gradations, and 
every extension of our knowledge, both of the existing animal, vegeta- 
ble, and microscopic worlds, and of those of past geological periods, 
multiplies instances of intermediate forms, differing from one another 
far less than do many of the individual varieties of recognized species. 
In the case of sponges, for instance, the latest conclusion of scientific 
research is this: that if you rely on minute distinctions as constituting 
distinct species, there are at least 300 species of one family of sponges, 
while if you disregard slight differences, which graduate into one 
another, and are found partly in one and partly in another variety, you 
must designate them all as forming only one species. Even in higher 
grades, as species are multiplied, it becomes more and more difficult 
to say where one ends and the other begins. Take the familiar 
instance of the grouse and ptarmigan. The red grouse is believed to 
be peculiar to the British Islands, while the ptarmigan is a very widely 
spread inhabitant of Arctic regions and high mountains. Which is 
more probable—that the grouse was specially created in the British 
Islands, apparently for the final cause of bringing sessions of Parlia- 
ment to wind up business in August, or that, as the rigor of the 
Glacial period abated, and heather began to grow, certain ptarmigan 
by degrees modified their habits and took to feeding on heather tops 
instead of lichens, and by so doing gradually became larger birds and 
assumed the color best adapted for protection in their new habitation ? 
In point of fact, grouse showing traces of this descent in smaller size 
and much whiter plumage are still to be met with. It would be easy 
to multiply instances, but this consideration seems conclusive. 

If we reject the Darwinian theory and adopt that of independent 
species descended from a specially created ancestor or pair of ances- 
tors, we are driven by each discovery of intermediate or slightly 
modified forms, into the assumption of more and more special acts 
of creation, until the number breaks down under its own weight, and 
belief becomes impossible. 

For instance, in the Madeira Islands alone, 134 species of air- 
breathing land-snails have been discovered by naturalists, of which 
twenty-one only are found in Africa or Europe, and 113 are peculiar to 
this small group of islands, where they are mostly confined to narrow 
districts and single valleys. Are we to suppose that each of these 113 
Species was separately created? Is it not almost certain that they are 
the modified descendents of the twenty-one species which had found 
their way there in a former geological period, when Madeira was united 
to Africa and Spain? 

There remains only the argument from the fertility of species 
anter se, and their refusal to breed with other species. This also, when 
closely examined, appears to be aprimd facie deduction, rather than 
an absolute law. Different species do, in fact, often breed together, 


56 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that. 
in this case the mule is sterile and no new race is established. But 
this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that. 
of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created, which is perfectly 
fertile. The progeny of dog and wolf has also been proved to be per- 
fectly fertile during the four generations for which the experiment was: 
continued. In the case of cultivated plants and domestic animals, 
there can be little doubt that new races, which breed true and are 
perfectly fertile, have been created within recent times from distinct. 
wild species. The Esquimaux dog is so like the Arctic wolf that there 
can be little doubt he is either a direct descendant, or that both are 
descendants from a common stock. The same is true of the jackal and 
some breeds of dogs in the Hast and Africa, and other races of dogs. 
are closely akin to foxes. But all dogs breed freely together, and can 
with difficulty be mated with the wild species which they so closely 
resemble. The modern Swiss cattle are pronounced by Rutimeyer to. 
show undoubted marks of descent from three distinct species of fossil 
oxen, the Bos primigenius, Bos longifrons, and Bos frontosus. 

There is now in the Zodlogical Gardens in Regent's Park a. 
hybrid cow, whose sire was an American bison and its mother a hybrid. 
between a zebu and agayal. This animal is perfectly fertile, and has 
bred again to the bison; but what is singular is, that this hybrid 
resembles much more an ordinary domestic English cow than it does: 
any of its progenitors. It is totally unlike the bison, both in appear- 
ance and disposition, and, except in having a projecting ridge over the 
withers, it might be mistaken for a coarse, bony, common cow. If a 
hybrid bull had been born of the same type, and mated with this hybrid. 
cow, there is little doubt that a new race might have been established,. 
extremely different from its ancestors. 

In fact, nearly all the domesticated animals have the essential 
characters of new races. We cannot point to wild progenitors existing 
in any part of the world from which they are descended, and when they 
run wild they do not revert to any common ancestral form. 

In the vegetable world instances of fertile hybrids are still more: 
abundant, and the introduction and establishment of new varieties is a 
matter of every-day occurrence. 

Now, whatever artificial selection can do in a short time, tired 
selection can certainly do in a longer time, and nothing short of 
absolute proof of the impossibility of ‘species coming into existence by 
natural laws should induce us to fall back on the supernatural theory, 
with all its enormous difficulties of an innumerable multitude of special 
creations, most of them obviously imperfect and tentative—or rather, 
useless and senseless on any supposition except that of a necessary 
and progressive evolution. In fact, if it were not for its bearing on 
the nature and origin of man, few would be found to maintain the 
theory of miraculous creations, or to doubt that the world of life is 
regulated by fixed laws as well as the world of matter. But whatever 
touches man touches us closely, and brings into play a host of cherished 
aspirations and beliefs, which are too powerful to be displaced readily 
by calm, scientific reasoning. Shall man, who, we are told, was created. 
in God's image and only “a little lower than the angels,” be degraded 
into relationship with the brutes, and shown to be only the last. 
development of an animal type which, in the case of apes and monkeys, 
approaches singularly near to him in physical structure? Are the: 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 5F 
® 


saints and heroes whom we revere, and the beautiful women whom 
we admire, descended, not from an all-glorious Adam and all-lovely 
Eve, as portrayed in Milton’s “Paradise Lost,’ but from Paleolithic 
savages, more rude and bestial than the lowest tribe of Bushmen or 
Australians? Is the account of man’s creation and fallin the Hebrew 
Scriptures as pure a myth as that of Noah’s ark, or of Deucalion and. 
Pyrrha? 

The only answer to these questions is that truth is truth, and 
fact is fact, and that it is always better to act and to believe in con-- 
formity with truth and fact, than to indulge in illusions. There are 
many things in Nature which jar on our feelings and seem harsh and. 
disagreeable, but yet are hard facts, which we have to recognize and 
make the best of. Childhood does not pass into manhood without. 
exchanging much that is innocent and attractive for much that is. 
stern and prosaic. Death, with its prodigal waste of immature life, 
its sudden extinction of mature life in the plenitude of its powers, 
its heart-rending separations from loved objects, is a most disagreeable: 
fact. Butit would not improve matters to keep grown-up lads in 
nurseries for fear of their meeting with accidents, or becoming hard- 
ened by contact with the world. Progress, not happiness, is the law 
of the world; and to improve himself and others by constant struggles 
upwards is the true destiny of man. 

In working out this destiny the fearless recognition of truth is. 
essential. Facts are the spokes of the ladder by which we climb from 
earth to heaven, and any individual, nation, or religion, which, from 
laziness or prejudice, refuses to recognize fresh facts, has ceased to- 
climb and will end by falling asleep and dropping to a lower level. 

‘“‘Prove everything, hold fast that which is true,” is the maxim 
which has raised mankind from savagery to civilization, and which we 
must be prepared to act upon at all hazards and at all sacrifices, if we: 
wish to retain that civilization unimpaired and to extend it further. 





CHAPTER V. 
ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 


REAT as the effect has been of the wonderful discoveries of 
modern science of which I have attempted to give a general 
view in the preceding chapters, there remains one which has had the 
greatest effect of all in changing the whole current of moden thought, 
viz., the discovery of the enormous antiquity of man upon earth, and 
his slow progress upwards from the rudest savagery to intelligence,. 
morality, and civilization. It is needless to point out in what flagrant 
and direct opposition this stands to the theory that man is of recent 
miraculous creation, and that he was originally endowed with a glori- 
ous nature and high faculties, which were partially forfeited by an 
act of disobedience. It is important, therefore, to understand clearly 
the evidence upon which a conelusion rests, so startling and unex- 
pected as that which traces the origin of man back into the remote: 
periods of geological time. 
It had been long known that a stone period preceded the use of 
metals. Flint arrow-heads, stone axes, knives, and chisels, rude: 


58 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


pottery, and other human remains lie scattered almost everywhere, on 
or near the existing surface, and are found in the sepulchral mounds 
and monuments which abound in all countries until they are destroyed 
by the progress of agriculture. These are certainly ancient, for their 
origin was so completely forgotten that the stone hatchets or celts 
{from the Latin celtis, or chisel) were universally believed to be 
thunderbolts which had fallen from heaven. But there was no proof 
that they were very ancient, they were always found at or near the 
‘present surface, and if animal remains were associated with them, they 
were those of the dog, ox, sheep, red deer, and other wild and domestic 
species now found in the same district. Historical record was not 
supposed to extend beyond the 4,000 or 5,000 years assigned to it by 
Bible chronology, and it was thought that this might be sufficient to 
account for all the changes which had occurred since man first became 
an inhabitant of the earth. Above all, the negative evidence was 
relied on, that geologists had explored far and wide, and although 
they had found fossil remains which enabled them to restore the 
characteristic fauna of so many different formations, they had found 
no trace of man or his works anywhere below the present surface. 
This seemed so conclusive that Cuvier, the greatest authority of the 
day, pronounced an emphatic verdict that man had not existed contem- 
poraneously with any of the extinct animals, and probably not for 
more than 5,000 or 6,000 years. Here, then, appeared to be an edifice 
based on scientific fact, in which geologists and theologians could 
dwell together comfortably, and the weight of their united authority 
was sufficient to silence all objections, and ignore or explain away the 
instances which occasionally cropped up, of human remains found in 
situations implying greater antiquity. 

Suddenly, I may almost say ina single day, this edifice collapsed 
like a house of cards, and the fact became apparent that the duration 
of human life on the earth must be measured by periods of tens, if not 
of hundreds of thousands of years. 

It happened thus: A retired French physician, Monsieur Boucher 
de Perthes, residing at Abbeville, in the valley of the Somme, had a 
hobby for antiquarianism as decided as that of Monkbarns himself. 
Abbeville afforded him a capital collecting-ground for the indulgence 
of his tastes, as the sluggish Somme flows through a series of peat 
mosses, which are extensively worked for fuel, and afford many remains 
of the Gallo-Roman and pre-Roman or Celtic period. Higher up, on 
the slopes of the low hills which bound the wide valley, are numerous 
beds of gravel, sand, and brick-earth, which are also extensively worked 
for road and building materials. In these pits remains of the mam- 
moth, rhinoceros, and other extinct animals are frequently found, and 
the workmen had noticed occasionally certain curiously-shaped flints, 
to which they gave the name of “langues du chat,” or cats’ tongues. 
Some of these were taken to Monsieur Boucher de Perthes as curiosi- 
ties for his museum, and he at once recognized them as showing marks 
of human workmanship. This put him on the-trace, and in the year 
1841 he himself discovered, im sit, ina seam of sand containing remains 
of the mammoth, a flint rudely but unmistakably fashioned by human 
hands into a cutting instrument. During the next few years a large 
quantity of gravel was removed to form the Champ de Mars at Abbe- 
ville, and many of these celts or hatchets were found. In 1847, M. 
Boucher de Perthes published his “Antiquités Celtiques et Antédilu- 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 59 


viennes,” giving an account of these discoveries,but no one would listen 
to him. The united authority of theologians and geologists opposed 
an infallible veto on the reception of such ideas, and it must be admitted 
that M. Boucher de Perthes himself did his best to discredit his own 
discoveries by associating them with visionary speculations about suc- 
cessive deluges and creations of pre-Adamite men. At length Dr 
Falconer, the well-known paleontologist, who had brought to light so 
many wonderful fossil remains from the Sewalik hills in India, happened 
to be passing through Abbeville and visited M. Boucher de Perthes’ 
collection. He was so much struck by what he saw that on arriving in 
London he spoke to Mr. Prestwich, the first living authority on the 
tertiary and quaternary strata, and Mr. Evans, whose authority was 





FLINT Hacuz, FLINT Hous, 
From Moulin Quignon, Abbeville. From St. Acheul, Valley of the Somme, 
(Half the actual size.) (Half the actual size.) 


(From Lubbock’s “ Prehistoric Times.’’) 


equally great on everything relating to the stone implements found in 
such numbers in the more recent or Neolithic period. He urged them 
to go to Abbeville and examine for themselves whether there was any- 
thing in these alleged discoveries. They did so, and the result was that 
on their return to England Mr. Prestwich read a paper to the Royal 
Society on the 19th May, 1859, which conclusively and forever estab- 
lished the fact that flint implements of unmistakable human workman- 
ship had been found, associated with the remains of extinct species, 1n 
beds of the Quaternary period deposited at a time when the Somme 
ran at a level more than 100 feet higher than at present, and was only 
beginning to excavate its valley. 


60 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


The spell once broken evidence poured in from all quarters, and 
although twenty-five years only have elapsed since Mr. Prestwich’s 
paper was read, the number of stone and other implements worked by 
man, deposited in museums, is already counted by tens cf thousands, 

er and they have been found from Dey- 
onshire to India, in France, England, 
Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Northern 
Africa, Palestine, and Hindostan, and. 
in fact wherever they have been looked. 
for, except in northern countries which 
were buried under ice during the Glacial 
period. Some idea of the immense 
‘wuey’ number of these rude implements may 
wee” be formed from the fact that the valley 
¥ system of one small river, the Little 
Ouse, which rises near Thetford and 
flows into the Wash after a course of 
twenty-five miles, has within little more 
than ten years yielded about 7,000 
specimens. 
~They have been found in great 
abundance in the valley gravels of the 
Thames, Ouse, Wiltshire Avon, and in 
fact in all theriver gravels and brick- 
earths of the south and south-east of 
England; and in those of the Somme, 
Oise, Seine, Loire, and all the principal 
river systems of France; and in less 
numbers, probably because they have 
been less looked for, in similar situations 
over an area extending from Central 
and Southern Enrope to Madras and 
: China. It is a remarkable fact about 
Peon Hosa: ‘Suffolk. these river-drift implements that they 
(Half the actual size.) are all nearly of the same typeand found. 
(From Lubbock’s ‘‘ Prehistoric Times.”) under similar circumstances, thas is to 
say, in the gravels, sands, brick-earths, and fine silt or loess deposited 
by rivers which have either ceased to run, or which ran at levels 
higher than their present ones and were only beginning to excavate 
their present valleys. Also they are always found in association with 
remains of what is known as the quaternary, as distinguished from 
the recent or existing fauna, and which is characterized by the mam- 
moth, the thick-nosed rhinoceros, and other well-known types of 
extinct animals. ‘The general character of these implements is very 
rude, implying a social condition at least as low as that of the Australian. 
savages of the present day. They consist mainly of the flake; the 
chopper or pebble, roughly chipped to an edge on one side; the 
scraper, used probably for preparing skins; pointed flints used for 
boring, and by far the most abundant and characteristic of all, the 
hdche or celt, a sharp or oval implement, roughly chipped from flint 
or, in its absence, from any of the hard stones of the district, such as 
chert or quartzite, and intended to be held in the hand and used 
without any haft or handle. 
These hdches are evidently the first rude type of human tools, 





ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 61 


from which the later forms of the axe, adze, chisel, wedge, etc., have 
been derived by a very slow and lengthened process of evolution. They 
differ, however, in many essential respects, from the more perfect 
stone celts of later periods and of modern savages. The chipping is 
very rude, they are never ground or polished, the pointed end is that 
intended for use, the butt-end being left blunt, showing that the 
hdche was not hafted but held in the hand; while f 

the converse is always the case with the finely- 
chipped or polished stone celts and hatchets of 
the Neolithic period, which, in its later stages, are 
to all intents and purposes similar to modern 
implements, only made of stone instead of metal. 
But these Paleolithic hdches are only one step in 
advance of the rude natural stone which an intelli- 
gent orang or chimpanzee might pick up to crack 
a cocoa-nut with, or to grub upa root from the 
earth, or an insect from a rotten tree. 

At the same time there is not the remotest 
doubt as to their being the work of human hands. 
When placed side by side with the rudest forms 
of stone hatchets actually used by the Australian ,, S i. 
and other savages, it is difficult to detect any differ-“°"""Noohtnie, 
ence. If placed in an ascending series, from the (gare the actual size.) 
oldest and rudest, to the finely-finished axes and rom Iubbock’s 
arrow-heads of the period immediately preceding “Ftebistoric Times.”) 
the use of metal, the progress may be clearly traced by insensible 
gradations. The blows given to bring the block to the desired shape 











































































































SAN 
HANH han 


Pat 





Fuint Apzz, Movern Stone ApZzE, 
From Danish Kitchen-middens. New Zealand. 
(From Lubbock’s “ Prehistoric Times.’’) 


by intentional chipping have left distinct marks; and archeologists 
have succeeded, with a little practice, in fashioning similar implements 
from modern flints. In fact, forgeries nave been made by workmen 
in localities where collectors were eager and credulous, though for- 





aS 








DEVELOPMENT OF THE LANCE, 



































































































































































































































































































































































































































PALZOLITHIC. 


Mammoth Period. 








































































































i 


PaLAOLirHic 
mmoth Per 


Aan 


M 


PALZOLITHIC, 
Mammoth Penod.. 


Larner Weorirsic,’ 


oric T mes,” 





AAR Ere 








ARE 


= 
e 


THI 
(From Lubbock’s “ Preh 


Earzty 


{ 
‘ 


ndeer Period.. 


, 


PALAOEITHIC. 


Re: 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 63 


tunately such forgeries are easily distinguished from genuine antiques 
by the different appearance of the old and recent fractures, and other 
signs which make it almost impossible to deceivean experienced eye. 
The conclusion, therefore, of one of our best archeologists may be 
safely accepted, that it is as impossible to doubt that these rude stone 
flakes and hatchets are works of human art, as it would be if we had 
found clasp-knives and carpenters’ adzes. 

The remains of human skeletons are, as might be expected, very 
rare in theseriver drifts, which have been formed under conditions. 
where the preservation of such remains would be very unlikely. In 
fact, as Sir John Lubbock points out, the bones found in the river 
gravels are almost invariably those of animals larger than man, such as 
the mammoth and rhinoceros. Still a few human bones have been 
found, sufficient to show that these river-driff men were probably a 
dolichocephalic or long and narrow-headed race, with prominent jaws, 
massive bones, and great muscular strength, but still, although rude 
and savage, of an essentially human type, and going a very little way 
towards bridging over the gap between the savage and the ape. 

A more complete view, however, of the conditions of human life at. 

these remote periods is afforded by the evidence given by caves, where 
naturally the remains of man are much more abundant and much 
better preserved. Before entering, however, on the examination of 
this class of evidence, it may be well to give an instance which may 
help to familiarize the imagination with the vast periods of time which | 
must have elapsed since Paleolithic man left these rude implements 
within reach of river floods. 

Among the gravels in which Paleolithic hdches have been found, 
are some which ¢ap the cliffat Bournemouth at a height of about 130 
feet above the sea. This gravel can be traced in a gradual fall from 
west to east, along the Hampshire coast and the shores of the Solent 
to beyond Spithead, and was evidently deposited by a river which 
carried the drainage of the Dorsetshire and Hampshire downs into the 
sea to the eastward, and of which the present Avon, Test, and Itchen 
were tributaries. But for such a river torun in such @ course the 
whole of Poole and Christ-church bays must have been dry land, and 
the range of chalk downs now broken through at the Needles must 
have been continuous. To borrow the words Evans in the “ Ancient 
Stone Implements,” “ Who, standing on the edge of the lofty cliff at 
Bournemouth, and gazing over the wide expanse of waters between the 
present shore and a line connecting the Needles on the one hand and 
the Ballard Down Foreland on the other, can fully comprehend how 
immensely remote was the epoch when what is now that vast bay was 
high and dry land, and along range of chalk downs, 600 feet above 
the sea, bounded the horizon on the south? And yet this must have 
been the sight that met the eyes of those primeval men who frequented 
the banks of that ancient river which buried their handiworks in 
gravels that now cap the cliffs, and of the course of which so strange 
but indubitable a memorial subsists in what has now become the Solent 
Sea.” 

Any attempt to assign a more precise date than the vague one 
of immense antiquity to these early traces of primeval man, had better 
be postponed until we have examined the more detailed and extensive 
body of evidence which has been afforded by the exploration of caves, 
to which the great discovery at Abbeville at once gave an immense 


G4 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGET. 


impulse, and which has since been prosecuted in England, France, 
Belguim, and Germany, with the greatest ardor and success. 

The caves in which fossil remains are found occur principally in 
limestone districts. They are due to the property which water 
“possesses, when charged with a small quantity of carbonic acid, of 
dissolving lime. Rain falling on the earth’s surface takes up carbonic 
acid from contract with vegetable matter, and a portion of it finds its 
‘way through cracks and crevices in the subjacent rock to lower levels, 
where it comes out in springs of hard water charged with carbonate 
of lime from the rock which it has dissolved. It has been calculated 
that the average rainfall on a square mile of chalk thus carries away 
about 140 tons of solid matter ina year. In this way underground 
channels are formed, some of which become large enough to admit 
of streams flowing through them, and even rivers, as is seen in the 
limestone district of Carinthia, where considerable rivers are swallowed 
‘up and run for miles beneath the surface. In this way caverns are 
formed, or sometimes a series of caverns, which represent the pools of 
the rivers which formerly flowed through them. Accumulations were 
formed at the bottom of these pools of whatever may have been brought 
down by the stream, and when, owing to changes in level or denuda- 
tion of the gathering grounds, the rivers ceased to flow in the old chan- 
nel, these pools became dry and were converted into caves, in which 
wild beasts and man found shelter and left their remains. The débris 
thus formed accumulated with a mixture of blocks which fell from the 
roof, and of red loamy earth consisting of the residue of the limestone 
rock insoluble in water, and of dust and mud brought in by winds and 
‘floods, and occasionally interstratified by beds of stalagmite, composed 
of thin films of crystalline carbonate of lime, deposited drop by drop by 
drippings through the rock forming the roof of the cave. These drip- 
‘pings form what are called stalactites, which hang like pendent icicles 
trom the roof of caves, and as the drip falls from these it forms a cor- 
responding deposit, known as stalagmite, on the floor below. The 
‘formation of this deposit is necessarily extremely slow, and it only goes 
on when the drops of water charged with a minute excess of carbonate 
of lime come in contact with the air; so that whenever the floor of the 
ave was under water no stalagmite could beformed. The alternations, 
therefore, of deposits of stalagmite represent alternations of long 
‘periods during which the cave was generally dry or generally flooded. 
During the dry periods, when the cave happened to be inhabited, the 
treadings on the floor would prevent the accumulation of an unbroken 
deposit of pure stalagmite, and the crystalline matter would be employed 
in forming a solid cement of the various débris into what is known as 
-a breccia. 

Another class of caves, or rock-shelters, has been formed along the 
sides of valleys bounded by cliffs, where the stratification is horizontal 
or nearly so; but the different beds vary much in hardness and per- 
‘meability to water. The softer strata weather away more rapidly than 
the others, and thus form shallow caves or deep recesses in the face of 
the cliffs, with a floor of hard rock below and a roof of hard rock above, 
which afford dry and commodious shelters for any sort of animal, includ- 
‘ing man. In other respects they resemble the first class of caves in 
having their contents cemented into a breccia by the dripping of water 
‘charged with carbonate of lime from the roof, and, if the cave hap- 
‘pened to be deserted for a long period, this deposit would in the same 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 65 


way form abed of stalagmite and seal up securely everything below it. 
in some cases, also, the roof would fall in, and thus preserve every- 
thing previously existing in the cave for the investigation of future 
geologists. 

With these general remarks readers will be able to understand 
the evidence afforded by the remains of man found in caverns. I will 
begin by taking as a typical case that of Kent’s Cavern, near Torquay, 
because it is one of the earliest and best known, and all the facts 
concerning it have been verified by explorations carefully conducted 
by a committee appointed by the British Association in 1864, and 
which comprised the names of the most eminent authorities in geology 
and paleontology, including those of Sir Charles Lyell, Sir John 
Lubbock, Mr. Evans, Mr. Boyd Dawkins, Mr. Pengelley, and others. 

The cave is about a mile east from Torquay harbor, and runs 
into a hill of Devonian limestone in a winding course, expanding into 
Jarge chambers connected by narrow passages. The following is the 
series of deposits in descending order in the large chamber near the 
entrance: 

1. Large blocks of limestone which have fallen from the roof. 

2. A layer of black, muddy mould, three inches to twelve inches 

thick. : 

3. Stalagmite one foot to three feet thick. 

4. Red cave-earth with angular fragments of limestone of variable 

thickness, but in places five to six feet thick. 

In the black earth above the stalagmite were found a number of 
relics of the Neolithic or polished stone period, with a few articles of 
bronze and pottery, some of which appear to be of a date as late as 
that of the Roman occupation of Britain. Associated with these are 
bones of ox, sheep, goat, pig, and other ordinary forms of existing 
species, and there is an entire absence of any older fauna, or of any of 
the ruder forms of Paleolithic implements. When we get below the 
stalagmite into the underlying cave-earth, the case is entirely reversed. 
Not a single spetimen of polished or finely-wrought stone, or of 
pottery, is-to be found; a vast number of celts or hdches, scrapers, 
knives, hammer stones, and other stone implements, are met with, 
which are all of the rude Paleolithic type found in the river drifts, 
with a few bone implements such as harpoon-heads, a pin, an awl, and 
a needle, like those frequently met with in the caves of France and 
Belgium. Associated with these are a vast number of bones and 
teeth, all of which belong to the old quaternary fauna, of which many 
species have become extinct and others have migrated to distant 
latitudes. 

The following is a list of the mammalian remains which have been 
found in this cave-earth below the stalagmite: 


ABUNDANT, 
The Cave Lion, a large extinct species of lion. 
Cave Hyena, cs $5 hyzena. 
Cave Bear, hy aint bear, 
Grizzly Bear. 


Mammoth (£lephas primigenius). : 
Rhinoceros ( Tichorinus), woolly or thick-nosed extinct species. 
Horse. 

Bison. 

Trish Elk. 


66 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


Red Deer. 
Reindeer, 
ScARCE. 


Brown Bear. 

Urus. 

Hare. | 

Lagomnys, tailless Arctic hare, 

Water Vole. 

Field Vole. 

Bank Vole, 

Beaver. 

And one specimen of the Machairodus, or Great Sabre-toothed Tiger, 
which is one of the characteristic species of the upper Miocene and 
Piiocene formations, 

These constitute a fauna which is characteristic of the Pleistocene, 
Quaternary, or Paleolithic period, and essentially different from that. 
of the prehistoric or Neolithic period, which is practically the same as 
that now existing. Wherever remains of the mammoth, woolly rhi- 
noceros, and cave bear are found, Paleolithic implements may be 
expected, and conversely. In fact Paleolithic man is as essentially 
part of the characteristic fauna of the Quaternary period, as the 
Palzotherium is of the Hocene, or the Deinotherium and Hipparion of 
the Miocene. 

A large number of other caves have been explored in England, 
notably the Victoria Cave near Settle in Yorkshire, the Gower Caves in 
South Wales, the Brixham,Cave in Devonshire, the Woking Cave in 
Somersetshire, and King Arthur’s Cave in Herefordshire, and the 
results have been everywhere practically the same as those at Kent’s. 
Cavern. ‘The same class of implements have been found and the same 
fauna, with the occasional addition of a few species, among which 
the hippopotamus is the most remarkable. Everywhere there is the 
same entire break between the Neolithic and the Paleolithic deposits, 
and the same evidence of great antiquity for the latter. It would 
appear as if in the British area some great geological change, such as. 
submergence beneath the sea or invasion of the ice, had exterminated 
or driven away Paleolithic man, along with the mammoth, rhinoceros, 
cave bear, and other extinct animals of the Paleolithic fauna, and after 
along lapse of time the area had again become habitable and been 
occupied by a newer race and by the recent fauna. 

The same remark applies to the river drifts, which not in England. 
only, but everywhere, appear to belong to a distinct period, vastly 
more ancient than any of the recent deposits in which Neolithic 
remains are found. So far, therefore, as the river drifts and British 
caves are concerned, all that we could say of the Palseolithic period is. 
that it is of vast antiquity, and must have lasted for an immense time, 
as it was in force for the whole time requisite for rivers like the Somme 
or Avon, which drain small areas, to cut down their present valleys, 
often two or three miles wide, from the level of their upper gravels, 
which are in many places 100 to 150 feet above the level of the highest. 
floods of the present rivers. 

But the caves of France and Belgium supply us with more evidence, 
and enable us to trace the history of long periods of Paleolithic time, 
and study in detail the succession of changes that have occurred, and. 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 67 


the habits, arts, and industries of the various tribes of primitive men 
who occupied these caves and rock-shelters at these remote periods. 
In fact, it may be said with truth that we know more about the men 
who chased the mammoth and reindeer in the South of France perhaps 
50,000 years ago, than we do about those who lived there immediately 
before the classical era, or less than 5,000 years ago. 

In certain provinces of France and Belgium it happens fortunately 

that there are extensive districts of limestone, in which caverns and 
rock-shelters are extremely abundant and full of Paleolithic remains in 
an excellent state of preservation. The abundance of such caves may 
be estimated from the fact that the cliffs, bounding one small river, 
the Vezere, in the department of Dordogne in the South of France, 
contain in a distance of eight or ten miles no fewer than nine different 
stations, each of which has given a vast variety of remains embedded in 
the breccias and cave-earths of their respective floors; and the small 
river Lesse in Belgium has been scarcely less prolific. Of the abun- 
dance of the human and animal remains found in such caverns it may 
be sufficient to say that one alone, that of Chaleux in the valley of the 
Lesse, is computed by Dumont to have yielded not less than 40,000 
distinct objects. 
' The great abundance of remains thus collected, both of human 
bones and implements, and of animals contemporaneous with them,, 
have made it possible to classify and arrange, in relative order of time,, 
a good many of the subdivisions of the Paleolithic period. This has. 
been done partly by the order of superposition and partly by the 
greater or less rudeness of the implements of stone and bone, and by 
the greater or less abundance of those animals of the quaternary fauna: 
which appeared first and disappeared soonest. The result has been to. 
show that the period when vast herds of reindeer roamed over the: 
plains of Southern France up to the Pyrenees was not the earliest, but. 
was preceded by a long period when the reindeer was scarce, and the: 
remains of the mammoth, cave bear, and cave hyena were more abun- 
dant than in the following ages. The implements of this period are of 
the earlier river-drift type and extremely rude, and there is an almost: 
entire absence of instruments of bone. 

Gradually as we pass upwards the more Southern forms of ele- 
phant, rhinoceros, antelopes, and great carnivora disappear, and the 
mammoth and cave bear become scarcer, while the reindeer becomes. 
more and more abundant until at length it furnishes the chief source: 
of food, and its horns one of the principal materials for the manu-. 
facture of implements. Concurrently with this change we find a 
progressive improvement in the arts of life, as shown by stone imple- 
ments more carefully chipped into a greater variety of forms, and 
arrow and lance-heads, barbed harpoons, awls, and needles for sewing 
skins, made chiefly from the antlers of the reindeer. 

At length we arrive at one of the most interesting facts disclosed 
by these researches, that during one of the later or reindeer periods. 
of the Paleolithic era, many of the caves in the South of France, and 
also in Switzerland and Southern Germany, were occupied by a race 
who, like the Esquimaux of the present day, had a strong artistic 
tendency, and were constantly drawing with the point of a flint on 
stone or bone, or modeling with flint knives from horns and bones, 
sketches of the animals they hunted, scenes of the chase, or other 
objects which struck their fancy. These are exceedingly well done,, 





PorTRAIT OF MAMMOTH. 


‘Drawn with s fint’op a'piece of Mammoth’s ivory ; from Cave of La Madeleine, 
Dordogne, France, 





EARLIEST PORTRAIT OF A MAN, WITH SERPENT AND Horses’_HE4D8,. 
From Grotto of Les Eyzies.. Reindeer Period.. 


. 
oo 


(we 





REINDEER FEEDING. 
From Grotto of Thayngen, near Schaffhausen, Switzerland) 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 69 


so that there is no difficulty in recognizing the animals intended to 
be represented, among which are the mammoth, cave bear, reindeer, 
wild horse, and wild ox.. The sketch of the mammoth which is engraved. 
on a piece of ivory, from the cave of La Madeleine in the valley of the 
Vezére, is particularly interesting, as it corresponds exactly with the 
mammoth whose body was found entire in frozen mud on the banks 
of a river in Siberia, and it sets at rest all possible question of man 
having been really contemporary with this extinct animal in the South 
of France. 

The drawings and carvings of other animals, especially of the 
reindeer, are often extremely spirited, and one especially of a reindeer 
engraved on a bit of bone from a cave at Thayngen, near Schaffhausen 
in Switzerland, would do credit to any modern animal painter. A very 
few human figures are found among these primeval drawings, but 
strangely, while the animals are so well drawn, those of men are very 
inferior and almost infantine in execution. They are sufficient, how- 
ever, to show that the savage of Périgord pursued the formidable 
aurochs, naked, armed with a lance or javelin, bearded on the chin but 
not on the rest of the face, and wearing his hair ina tuft on the top 
of the head. 

We do not, however, depend on these drawings for evidence of the 
sort of men who inhabited these caves in Paleolithic days. A large 





Mentone SKELETON. Paleolithic. Reindeer Period. 


number of skulls and complete skeletons have been found in different 
caves, some of which have served as sepulchral vaults for families and 
tribes, while in others individuals have been crushed by falls of rock, 
or otherwise interred, and in a few cases skulls and bones have been 
found at great depths in river drifts, and in the loess, or fine glacial 
mud which fills up the valley of the Rhine and other areas over which 
the great Swiss glaciers when melting poured their turbid streams. 

The most celebrated of these are: 

The Neanderthal and Canstadt skulls, which are considered to 
belong to the oldest type, having been found in the lowest strata, 
“which contain the rudest implements and the most archaic fauna. Of 


70 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


these the Neanderthal skull has attracted much attention from its 
singularly brutal appearance, having a very low and receding forehead, 
and a massive bony ridge over the eyes resembling that of the gorilla. 
But the brain is of fair capacity, and occasional skulls of a similar 
type occur at the present day, so that we are not warranted in saying 
that we have discovered the ‘missing link” between man and ape, 
especially as the Engis and other skulls of this period present less 
exceptional features. All we can safely say is that the oldest type 
of man known to us seems to have been characterized by long and 
narrow heads, prominent eyebrows, medium stature, and great thick- 
ness of bones and prominence of ridges denoting great muscular 
strength. 

The discovery of a sepulchral chamber at Cro-Magnon in the valley 
of the Vezére, with several entire skeletons, gave evidence of another 
type which has been found elsewhere in caves of the same age, viz., 
newer than the earliest mammoth and cave bear age to which the old- 
est skulls are referred, but older than the subsequent reindeer age, and 
still characterized by great rudeness of implements. This is a remark- 
able type, for these savages were really a fine race of men, tall in stature 
and with well-developed brain. They are long-headed, but not more so 
than is often found in the best modern European skulls, and the aver- 
age capacity of the skull exceeded that of most modern races, while 
their average height was not less than 5 ft. 10 in. for the men, and 5 
ft. 6 in. for the women. 

Another totally different race appears in caves of the same period 
or a little later, which is known as the Furfooz race, from a sepulchral 
cave in Belgium where a number of skeletons were discovered, but 
which appears to have been widely spread throughout Europe towards 
the middle of the Paleolithic period. The type of this race is almost 
exactly that of the modern Lapp, short in stature, averaging not above 
5 ft., though strong and muscular, and with small round heads and 
high cheek bones. From this time forward, long and short-headed 
races, and intermediate types resulting probably from their intermix- 
ture, seem to have existed pretty much as they do at the present day, 
and the important conclusion to be drawn is, that even as far back as 
the early Glacial period, man had already existed long enough to 
develop different races, and in sufficient numbers to scatter wandering 
tribes of savage hunters widely over the earth and up to the verge of 
glaciers and the utmost confines of inhospitable regions. 

In trying to fix anything like definite dates for man’s existence 
upon earth, we must reverse the process by which we have proved the 
enormous antiquity of his earliest remains, and ascend step by step 
shu the known to the unknown. The first step is that supplied by ° 
history. 

Authentic Egyptian history begins with Menes, the first king who 
united the different provinces of Egypt into one empire. 

The date of this event has been fixed by the best authorities, who 
have devoted their lives to the study of Egyptian texts and monu- 
ments, at about 5,000 years z.c., or say 7,000 years before the present 
time. Boeck makes it 3.c., 5702, Unger 5613, Mariette 5004, Brugsch 
4455, Lauth 4157, Lepsius, 3892, and Bunsen 3623. 

It will be observed that the tendency of all the more recent 
investigations is to lengthen the date, and that of Mariette may be 
safely assumed as the mininvwm limit of time for the foundation of 
the Egyptian monarchy. ‘ 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. {a 


Now this date shows no trace of approach to a primitive and 
uncivilized state of things. On the contrary, Menes is related to have 
carried out a great engineering work by which the Nile was embanked, 
its course changed, and the new capitol city of Memphis built on the 
site reclaimed. His next successor, Tet, is credited with having 
written learned treatises on medicine and anatomy, and the earliest 
pyramid, that of Sakkara, was probably built by a king who ascended 
the throne only eighty-eight years after the death of Menes. 

The annals and monuments of Chaldza and China take us back 
to about 2,500 years B.c., or say for 4,500 years from the present time, 
and tell the same tale as those of Egypt of dense population and a 
high degree of civilization already established. In fact, it is evident 
that the great alluvial valleys of rivers such as the Nile and Euphrates 
have been inhabited for a number of centuries by a population who 
had emerged from the hunter and pastoral stage into that of agricul- 
ture, and had increased and multiplied until great cities were built 
and mighty monarchies founded, and who were in possession of most 
of the arts of civilized life. The Egyptian date which carries us back 
about 7,000 years is, however, by far the earliest upon which we can 
rely as an authentic record, and any glimmerings of history beyond 
this are obviously mythical. | 

Here, then, we take leave of history, and must explore our way 
upwards by the aid of archeology and geology. 

The earliest historical civilizations were all acquainted with 
metals, chiefly in the form of bronze, which is an alloy of copper and 
tin, very hard, easily cast, and well adapted for every description of 
tool and weapon. Indeed, it has only been superseded by iron 
within recent historical times. But the Bronze Age was preceded 
by a long Neolithic period, when stone, finely wrought and often 
ground or polished, was used for the purposes to which metal was 
afterwards applied. The men of this Neolithic period were compara- 
tively civilized; they had all the common domestic animals, the dog, 
horse, ox, sheep, goat, and pig; also some of the cultivated grains, as 
wheat and barley; they wore clothing and lived in villages. Accord- 
ing to all appearance they were the first wave of the great migrations 
into Europe from Asia, and either occupied regions left empty by the 
Jast vicissitudes of the Glacial period, or conquered, and partly exter- 
minated and partly intermixed with, the ruder savages of the Palzo- 
lithic period. Some think the Iberian or Basque people may bea 
remnant of this Neolithic race, who were driven westward by the later 
wave of Celtic migration just as the Celts were by the still later waves 
of Teutonic and Slavonic immigrants. Be this as it may, itis certain 
that a Neolithic people were spread very widely over the globe, as 
their remains of very similar character are found almost everywhere 
in Europe, Asia, and America, and always in association with the 
existing or most recent fauna and configuration of the earth’s surface. 

The difficulty in assigning any precise date for these remains arises 
very much from tie fact that the Neolithic passed into the Bronze or 
historical civilization, at different times in different countries. The 
Australians, the Polynesians, and the Esquimaux were or are still in 
the Stone period, while steam-engines are spinning cotton at Man- 
chester, and the most famous cities of Egypt and the East have been 
for centuries buried under shapeless mounds of their own ruins. 
It is probable that all Europe remained in the Neolithic stage for 


72 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


many centuries after the historical date of the commencement of the 
Egyptian empire. 

Still there are some remains which may enable us to form an 
approximate conjecture of the time during which this Neolithic period 
may have lasted. 

The two principal clues are furnished: 

1. By the Danish mosses and kitchen-middens. 

2. By the Swiss lake-dwellings. 

In Denmark there are a number of peat mosses varying in depth 
from ten to thirty feet, which have been formed by the filling up of 
small lakes or ponds in hollows of the Glacial drift. Around the 
borders of these mosses, and at various depths in them, lie trunks of 
trees which have grown on their margin. At the present surface are 
found beech-trees, which are now, and have been throughout the 
whole historical period of 2,000 years, the prevalent form of forest 
vegetation in Denmark. Lower down is found a zone of oaks, a tree 
which is now rare and almost superseded by the beech. And still 
lower, towards the bottom of the mosses, the fallen trees are almost 
entirely Scotch firs, which have been long unknown in Denmark and 
when introduced will not thrive there. It is evident, therefore, that 
there have been three changes of climate, causing three entire changes 
in the forest vegetation of Denmark, since these mosses began to be 
formed. The latest has lasted certainly for 2,000 years and we cannot 
tell how much longer, so that some period of more than 6,000 years 
must be assumed for the three changes. 

Now, it is invariably found that remains of the Iron Age are 
confined to the present or beech era, while bronze is found only in 
that of oak, and the Age of Stone coincides with that of the Scotch fir. 

The kitchen-middens afford another memorial of the prehistoric 
age in Denmark. There are mounds found all along the sheltered 
sea-coasts of the main-land and islands, consisting chiefly of shells of 
the oyster, cockle, limpet, and other shell-fish, which have been eaten 
by the ancient dwellers on these coasts. Mixed up with these are the 
bones of various land animals, birds, and fish, and flint flakes, axes, 
worked bones and horns, and other implements, including rude hand- 
made pottery, ‘The relics are very much the same as those found in 
the fir zone of the peat mosses, and although old as compared with 
the Iron or historical age, they do not denote any extreme antiquity. 
The shells are all of existing species, though the larger size of some 
of those found on the shores of the Baltic shows that the salt water 
of the North Sea had then a freer access to it than at present. The 
bones of animals, birds, and fish are also all of existing species, and no 
remains of extinct animals, such as the mammoth, or even of reindeer, 
have been found. By far the most common are the red deer, roe-deer, 
and wild boar. The dog was known, but appears to have been the 
only domestic animal. 

Most of the stone implements are rude, but afew carefully- 
worked weapons have been found, and a few specimens of polished 
axes, which, with the presence of pottery and the nature of the fauna, 
show conclusively that these Danish remains are all of the Neolithic 
age and subsequent to the close of the Glacial period. In fact, similar 
shell mounds are found in almost all quarters of the globe where 
savage tribes have lived on the sea-coast, subsisting mainly on shell- 
fish, and they are probably still being formed on the shores of the 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 73: 


Greenland and Arctic Seas, and in Australia, and remote islands of 
the Pacific. _ 

Human remains are scarce in these Danish deposits, but numerous 
skulls and skeletons have been found in tumuli which, from their situ- 
ation and from stone implements being buried with the dead, may be 
reasonably inferred to be those of the people of the peat mosses and. 
shell mounds. They denote a short race with small and very round. 
heads, in many respects resembling the present Lapps, but with a 
more projecting ridge over the eye. 

On the whole, all we can conclude from these Danish remains is: 
that at some period, not less than 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, when 
civilization had already been long established in the valley of the Nile, 
rude races resembling the Lapps or Esquimaux lived on the shores of 
the Baltic, who, although so much more recent, and acquainted with 
the domestic dog, pottery, and the art of polishing stone, had not 
advanced much beyond the condition of the later cave-men of the 
South of France; and that this race was succeeded by one who brought. 
in the much higher civilization of the Bronze Age. 

The lake-dwellings of Switzerland give still more detailed and. 
interesting information as to Neolithic times. 

During a very dry summer in 1854, the Lake of Zurich fell below 
its usual level and disclosed the remains of ancient piles driven into. 
the mud, from which a number of deer-horns and other implements. 
were dredged up. This led to further researches, and the result has 
been that a large number of villages built on these piles has been dis- 
covered in almostall the Swiss lakes, as well as in those of Italy and 
other countries. On the whole, more than 200 have been discovered 
in Switzerland, and fresh ones are being constantly brought to light. 
They range over a long period,a few belonging to the Iron and even 
to Roman times; while the greater number are almost equally 
divided between the Age of Bronze and that of Stone. Some of them 
are of large size, and must have been long inhabited and supported a. 
numerous population, from the immense number of implements found, 
_ which at one station alone, that of Concise on the Lake of Neufchatel, 
amounted to 25,000. These implements consist mainly of axes, knives, 
arrow-heads, saws, chisels, hammers, awls, and needles, with a quantity 
of broken pottery, spindle-whorls, sinkers for nets, and other objects. 

In the oldest stations, where no trace of metal is found, and the. 
decay of the piles to a lower level shows the greatest antiquity, the 
implements are all of the Neolithic type, and the animal remains. 
associated with them are all of the recent fauna. There are no 
mammoths, rhinoceroses, or reindeer; the wild animals are the red. 
deer and roe, the urus, bison, elk, bear, wolf, wild cat, fox, badger, 
wild boar, ibex, and other existing species; and of domestic animals, 
the dog, pig, horse, goat, sheep, and at least two varieties of oxen. 
Birds, reptiles, and fish, were all of common existing species. Carbonized. 
ears of wheat and barley have been found, as also pears and apples, 
and the seeds, stones, and shells of raspberry, blackberry, wild plum, 
hazel-nut, and beech-nut. Twine, and bits of matting made of flax, as well. 
as the occurrence of spindle-whorls, show that the pile-dwellers were. 
acquainted with the art of weaving. 

On the whole, these pile-villages show that a large population 
lived in Switzerland for a long time before the dawn of history, who 
had already attained a considerable amount of civilization at their 


74 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


first appearance, which went on steadily increasing down to the time 
of the Roman conquest. Various attempts have been made to fix an 
approximate date for the earliest of these pile-villages, but they have 
not been very successful. They have been based mainly on the 
amount of silting up which has taken place in some of the smaller lakes 
since the piles were driven in, as compared with that which has 
occurred since the Roman period. The best calculations appear to 
show that 6,000 or 7,000 years ago Switzerland was already inhabited 
by men who used polished stone implements, but how long they had 
been there we had no distinct evidence to show. Perhaps 10,000 years 
may be taken as the outside limit of time that can be allowed for the 
Neolithic period in Switzerland, Denmark, or any known part of 
Europe. 

In Egypt, however, there is evidence of a much greater antiquity. 
Fragments of pottery, which was entirely unknown in the Paleolithic 
age, have been brought up by borings in the Nile Valley from depths 
which, at the average rate of accumulation there during the last 3,000 
years of three inches and a half in a century, would denote an age of 
from 13,000 to 18,000 years. Looking at the dense population and 
high civilization of Egypt at the commencement of history, 7,000 
years ago, it is highly probable that this time at least must have 
-elapsed since the country was first occupied by a settled agricultural 
population as far advanced in the arts of life as the lake-dwellers of 
Switzerland. 

Any calculation, however, of Neolithic time takes us back a very 
short step in the history of the human race. The Paleolithic period 
must evidently have been of vastly longer duration. 

Any attempt to estimate this must depend entirely on geological 
considerations. Paleolithic man is part of the Quaternary fauna, 
which came in with the commencement and continued down to the 
close of the great Glacial period. 

In carrying our researches further back, the possibility of assign- 

‘ing anything like a definite date for the existence of man depends, 
therefore, on the question whether it is possible to fix any approximate 
dates for the commencement and duration of this period. 

In the first place, how do we know that there has been a Glacial 
period? 

In England we are familiar with water, but not with ice; we there- 
fore recognize at once the signs of the action of water. If we come 
across a dry channel, winding in alternating curves between eroded 
banks, and showing deposits of gravel and silt, we say without hesita- 
tion, “Here a river formerly ran.” But if we had lived in Switzerland, 
‘we should recognize with equal certainty the signs of glacial action. 
Suppose any one visiting Chamouni walks up the valley to the foot of 
the Mer de Glace, where the Arve issues from the glacier, let us say in 
autumn, when the front of the glacier has shrunk. back some distance, 
what does he see? Rounded and polished rocks, which seem as if they 
had been planed by a gigantic plane working downwards over them, 
‘and on these a mass of miscellaneous rubbish shot down as if from a 
dust-cart, consisting of stones of all sizes, some of them boulders as 
big asa house, scattered irregularly on a mass of clay and sand. 
When he looks more closely he will see that these stones are not 
rounded as they would be by running water, but blunted at their 
-angles by a slow grinding action; and in many cases, both the stones 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 73 


and the rocks on which they rest are scratched and striated ina 
direction which is that of the glacier’s motion. At the bottom of this 
rubbish-heap he will find the clay into which the rock has been ground 
by the full weight of the glacier, very stiff and compact; while if he 
look down the valley, he will see, on a hot day, a swollen and turbid 
river issuing from the melting ice and flooding the meadows, on which 
it will leave a deposit of fine mud. These are effects actually produced 
by ice; and wherever he sees them he can infer the former presence of 
glacier, as certainly as when he sees a bed of rounded pebbles he infers 
the former presence of running water. The planed rocks are com- 
monly known as roches moutonnées froma fancied resemblance of 
their smooth, rounded hummocks to the backs of a flock of sheep 
lying down; the rubbish-heaps are called moraines, and the stiff 
bottom clay with boulders embedded in it is called the grund-moraine, 
till, or boulder clay; while the blunted and scratched stones are said 
to be glaciated. 

These tests, therefore, roches moutonnées, moraines, boulders, 
and glaciated stones, are infallible proofs that whevever we find them 
there has been ice-action, either in the form of glaciers, or of icebergs, 
which are only detached portions of glanciers floated off when the 
glacier ends in the sea. Now, if our inquirer extends his view, he 
will find that these signs, the meaning of which he has learned at the 
head of the valley of Chamouni, are to be found equally in every 
valley and over the whole plain of Switzerland, up to a height of more 
than 3,000 feet on the slope of the opposite Jura range, while on the 
Italian side the Glacial drift extends far into the plains of Piedmont. 

Extending our view still more widely, we find that every high 
mountain range in the Northern hemisphere has had its system of 
glaciers; and one great mountain mass, that of Scandinavia, has been 
the nucleus of an enormous ice-cap, radiating to a distance of not less 
than 1,000 miles, and thick enough to block up with solid ice the 
North Sea, the German Ocean, the Baltic, and even the Atlantic up to 
the 100 fathom line. This ice-cap, coalescing with local glaciers from 
the higher lands of England, Scotland, and Ireland, swept over their 
surface, regardless of minor inequalities of bill and valley, as far 
south as to the present Thames Valley, grinding down rocks, scatter- 
ing drift and boulders, and, in fact, doing the first rough sub-soil 
ploughing which prepared most of our present arable fields for cultiva- 
tion. The same ice-sheet spread masses of similar drift over Northern 
Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the northern half of European 
Russia, and left behind it numerous boulders which must have tray- 
eled all the way from Norway or Lapland. 

If we cross the Atlantic we find the same thing repeated ona 
still larger scale in North America. A still more gigantic ice-cap, 
radiating from the Laurentian ranges, which extend towards the pole 
from Canada, has glaciated all the minor mountain ranges to the 
south up to heights sometimes exceeding 3,000 feet, and coales- 
cing vast glaciers thrown off by the Rocky Mountains from their 
eastern flanks, has swept over the whole continent, leaving its record 
in the form of drift and boulders, down to the 40th parallel of latitude. 
It is difficult to realize the existence of such gigantic glaciers, but the 
proofs they have left are incontrovertible, and we have only to look to 
Greenland to see similar effects actually in operation. The whole of 
that vast country, where at former periods of the earth’s history, 


76 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


fruit-trees grew anda genial climate prevailed, is now buried deep 
under one solid ice-cap, from which only a few of the highest peaks. 
protrude, and which discharges its surplus accumulation of winter 
snow by huge glaciers filling all the fiords and pushing out into the 
sea with an ice-wall sometimes forty or fifty miles in length, from 
which icebergs are continually breaking off and floating away. A still 
more gigantic ice-wall surrounds the Southern Pole, and in a compara- 
tively low latitute presented an insuperable barrier to the further prog- 
ress of the ships of Sir J. Ross’s expedition. 

A still closer examination of the Glacial period shows that it was 
not one single period of intense cold but a prolonged period, during 
which there were several alternations, the glaciers having retreated 
and advanced several times with comparatively mild inter-glacial 
periods, but finally with a tendency on each successive advance to 
contract its area, until the ice shrank into the recesses of high moun- 
tains, where alone we now find it. Another noteworthy point is that. 
during this long Glacial period there were several great oscillations in 
the level of sea and land. 

Such was the Glacial period, and to assign its date is to fix the 
date when we know with certainty that man already existed, and had 
for some long though unknown time previously been an inhabitant of 
earth. Is this possible? To answer this question we must begin by 
considering what are the causes, or combination of causes, which may 
have given rise to such a Glacial period. When we look at the causes 
which actually produce existing glaciers, we find that extreme cold 
alone is not sufficient. In the coldest known region of the earth, in 
Eastern Siberia, there are no glaciers, for the land is low and level 
and the air dry. On the other hand, in New Zealand, in the latitude 
of England and with a mean annual temperature very similar to that 
of the West of Scotland, enormous glaciers descend to within 700 
feet of the sea-level. The reason is obvious; the Alps of the South 
Island rise to the height of 11,000 feet above the sea, and the preva- 
lent westerly winds strike on them laden with moisture from their 
passage over a wide expanse of ocean. In like manner, in the case of 
the Swiss Alps, the Himalayas, and other great mountain ranges, high 
land and moist winds everywhere make glaciers. Given the moist 
wind, any great depression of temperature, whether arising from 
elevation of land or other causes, will make it deposit its moisture in 
the form of snow, and the accumulation of snow on a large surface of 
elevated land must inevitably relieve itself by pushing down rivers of 
ice to the point where it melts, just as the rain-fall relieves itself by 
pouring down rivers to the point where the surplus water finds its 
level in the sea. 

When the two conditions of high land and moist winds are 
combined, low temperature increases their effect, and the snow-fall 
consolidates into a great ice-cap, from which only the tops of the 
highest mountains project, and which pushes out gigantic glaciers far 
over surrounding countries and into adjacent seas. Such is now the 
case in Greenland, and was formerly the case in Scandinavia, where a. 
huge sheet of ice radiated from it over Northern Germany as far as. 
Dresden, filled up the North Sea, and, coalescing with smaller ice-caps 
from the highlands of Scotland, England, and Wales, buried the 
British Islands up to the Thames under massive ice. At the same 
period glaciers from the Alps filled the whole plain of Switzerland, and 
in North America the ice-cap extended from Labrador to Philadelphia. 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 17 


The first remark to be made is that, as these phenomena depend 
primarily on moist winds, and only secondarily on cold, and as moist 
winds imply great evaporation and therefore great solar heat over 
extensive surfaces of water, all explanations are worthless which sup- 
pose a general prevalence of cold, either from less solar radiation, pas- 
sage through a colder region of space, or otherwise. We must seek 
for acause which is consistent with the general laws of Nature, and 
with the leading facts of the actual generation of glaciers at the 
present day. 

Astronomers believe that they have discovered such a cause, in 
the theory first started by Mr. Croll, that the glaciation of the 
Northern hemisphere was due to a secular change in the shape of the 
earth's orbit, combined with the shorter changes produced by the 
precession of the equinoxes. The latter cause is due to the fact that 
the earth is not an exact sphere but slightly protuberant at the equa- 
tor, and that the attraction of the sun on this protuberant matter 
prevents the axis round which the earth rotates from remaining 
exactly parallel with itself, and makes it move slowly round its mean 
position just as we seein the case of a schoolboy’s top, which reels 
round an.imaginary upright axis while spinning rapidly. This revolu- 
tion in the case of the earth completes its circle in about 21,000 years, 
so that if summer, when the pole is turned towards the sun, occurred 
in the Northern hemisphere when the earth was in perihelion, or 
nearest the sun, and consequently winter when it was in aphelion, or 
furthest away from the sun, after 10,500 years the position would be 
exactly reversed, and winter would occur in perihelion and summer in 
aphelion; the Southern hemisphere then enjoying the same conditions 
as those of the Northern one 10,500 years earlier. And in another 
10,500 years things would come back to their original position. 

Now if the earth’s orbit were an exact circle this would make no 
difference, all the four seasons would be of the same duration and 
would receive the same solar heat in both hemispheres, and if the 
orbit were nearly circular, so that the difference between the perihelion 
and aphelion distances was small, the effect would be small also. But 
if the orbit flattened out or became more eccentric, the effect would be 
increased. The time of traversing the aphelion portion of the annual 
orbit would become longer and that of traversing the perihelion portion 
shorter, as the orbit departed from the form of a circle and became 
more elliptic. Whenever, therefore, the North Pole was turned away 
from the sun in aphelion, the winters would be longer than the 
summers in the Northern hemisphere, and conversely, the summers 
would be longer than the winters when, after an interval of 10,500 
years, precession brought about the opposite condition of things, in 
which winter occurred in perihelion. 

At present the earth’s orbit is nearly circular, and the Northern 
hemisphere is nearest the sun in winter and furthest from it in summer, 
but the difference is only about 3,000,000 miles, or a small fraction of 
the total mean distance of 93,000,000 miles, which makes the winter 
half of the year shorter than the summer half by nearly eight days. 

But mathematical calculations show that under the complicated 
attractions of the sun, moon, and larger planets, the eccentricity of the 
earth’s orbit slowly changes at long and irregular intervals, but always 
within fixed limits, increasing up toa certain point and then dimin- 
ishing till it approaches the circular form, ,;when it again increases. 


"5 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


Tho maximum limit of eccentricity makes the difference between the 
greatest and least distances of the earth from the sun range between 
12,000,000 and 14,000,000 miles, which is four or five times as great 
as at present; and with this eccentricity, and winter in aphelion in 
the Northern hemisphere, the winter half of the year in Northern 
latitudes would be twenty-six days longer than the summer half, 
instead of eight days shorter as at present. In this state of things. 
the quantity of heat received daily from the sun in winter would be 
such as to lower the temperature of the whole Northern hemisphere 
by 85° Fahrenheit, and reduce the average January temperature of 
England from 39 to 4°, while the mean summer temperature would 
be about 60° higher than at present. But this summer heat, derived 
from solar radiation, would not counteract the cold of winter, for all 
moisture during winter being accumulated in ice, and snow, most of 
the solar heat of summer would be expended in supplying latent heat 
to melt a portion of this frozen accumulation, and dense fogs would. 
intercept a large amount of the solar radiation. 

After 10,500 years this state of things would be entirely reversed, 
and with twenty-six days more of summer, and the earth 12,000,000 
miles nearer the sun in winter, the Northern hemisphere would enjoy 
something like perpetual spring. There can be no doubt that these 
are real causes, and the only difficulty is to account for their not 
having been more invariable in their operation and given us a constant 
succession of Glacial periods since the commencement of geological 
time, whenever the eccentricity became great, which occurs at irregular 
periods, but practically about three times in every 3,000,000 years. 
The answer is that the effects would only occur when the other con- 
ditions were present, viz., high land, moist winds, and an absence of 
oceanic currents of warm water like the Gulf Stream. The latter is 
one of the main causes which affect temperature. The difference of 
temperature between the equatorial and polar regions causes a con- 
stant overflow of heated air from south to north, which is replaced by 
an indraught.of colder air from north to south, which, owing to the 
greater velocity of the earth’s rotation towards the equator, takes the 
form of trade-winds blowing constantly from amore or less easterly 
direction. These winds, sweeping over the Atlantic Ocean, raise its 
level at its western barrier, and the accumulation deflected by America, 
flows off in a current which extends to the western shores of Europe 
and carries mild winters into the extreme North. In the Orkney and 
Shetland Islands, which are nearly in the same latitude as Cape Fare- 
well in Greenland, there is so little ice that skating is a rare accom- 
plishment, and curling, the roaring game which is so popular some 
degrees further south, is quite unknown. If the Gulf Stream were 
diverted, and the highlands of Scotland upheaved to the height of the 
Alps of New Zealand the whole country would again be buried under 
glaciers pushing out into the Atlantic and German Ocean. 

These considerations may show why every period of great eccen- 
tricity was not necessarily a Glacial period, though under certain 
conditions it must inevitably have been so, and geologists are gener- 
ally agreed that the last period of the sort must have been one of 
the main causes of the great refrigeration which set in over the whole 
Northern hemisphere towards the close of the Pliocene period, and 
continued until recent times. But in this case we can fix the date 
with great accuracy, for calculation shows that the last period of 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 73 


great eccentricity began 240,000 years ago, and lasted 160,000 years. 
For the last 50,000 years the departure of the earth’s orbit from the. 
circular form has been exceptionally small. We may suppose the 
Glacial period, therefore, to have commenced 240,000 years ago, come 
to its height 160,000 years ago, and finally passed away 80,000 years 
before the present time. 

These dates receive much confirmation from conclusions drawn 
from a totally different class of facts. A bed of existing marine shells. 
of Arctic type, apparently belonging to one of the latest phases of 
the Glacial period, has been found on the top of a hill in North Wales 
which is now 1,100 feet above the sea-level, and the same marine drift 
seems to extend to a height of upwards of 2,000 feet. There must, 
therefore, have been a depression of the land sufficient to carry it. 
many fathoms below the sea, and a subsequent elevation sufficient to 
carry the sea bottom up toa height of certainly 1,100 and probably 
over 2,000 feet. In all probability, these movements were very slow 
and gradual, like those now going on in Greenland and Scandinavia, 
for there are no signs of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions in the 
district; and it is probable that pauses occurred in the movements, and. 
along pause when subsidence had ceased before elevation began. 
Without taking these pauses into account, and assuming the elevation 
only just completed, and that Sir C. Lyell’s average of two and a half 
feet a century is a fair rate for these slow movements, it would have 
required 50,000 years of continued elevation to bring these shells, and. 
80,000 years to bring the marine drifts, up to their present height 
above the sea; anda similar period previously must be allowed for 
their submergence. We may fairly conclude, therefore, that upwards 
of 100,000 years have elapsed since these shells lived and died at. 
the bottom of the sea towards the close of the Glacial period, 
which corresponds very well with the date assigned by astronomical. 
calculations. m~ 

Again, another attem{.) to fix a date for the close of the Glacial. 
period has been made by Monsieur Forel, a Swiss geologist, from 
actual measurements of the quantity of suspended matter poured into. 
the Lake of Geneva by the Rhone, and the area of the lake which has. 
been silted up since it was filled by ice. It is evident that this silting 
up at the head of the lake could only begin when the great Rhone 
glacier, which once extended to the Jura Mountains, had shrunk back. 
into its valley far enough to pour its river into the lake. M. Forel’s 
calculations give 100,000 years as the probable time required for the 
river to silt up so much of the lake as is now converted into dry land. 
The dataare somewhat vague, as on the one hand the rate of deposition 
may have been greater when a large mass of ice and snow was being” 
melted, while on the other hand it may have been less, while the 
glacier still occupied the valley almost to the head of the lake and the 
Rhone had only a course of a few miles. All that can be said, there- 
fore, is that it gives an approximate date for theclose of the Glacial 
period which, like that derived from rates of depression and elevation, 
corresponds wonderfully well with the date required by Croll’s theory. 

Now, whether the date be a little more or a little less, it is clear 
that man existed on earth throughout a great part, ifnot the whole, 
of the Glacial period. He had existed a long while in conjunction with 
a fauna of more Southern and African aspect, before the reindeer 
migrated in vast herds into Southern France. His remains are found 


80 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


in caves and river drifts associated with those of hippopotamus, an 
animal which could by no possibility have lived in rivers which for 
half the year were bound hard in ice. Such remains must therefore of 
necessity date either from a period before the great cold had set in, 
or from some inter-glacial period prior to the great cold which drove 
the reindeer, musk ox, glutton, and Arctic hare as far south as the 
slopes of the Pyrenees. 

In England we can trace distinctly at least four successions of 
boulder clays, that is of the ground moraines of land ice, separated by 
deposits of drifts, sands, and brick-earths, formed while the glaciers 
were retreating and melting; and a number of the Paleolithic imple- 
ments have been found in what was undoubtedly part of the period of 
the second or great chalky boulder clay, which overspreads the 
southern and eastern counties of England up to the Thames Valley. 
‘The discovery of Palzeolithic remains in the deposit of St. Prest, near 
Chartres, makes it almost certain that some at least of the ruder instru- 
aments must date back to the very beginning of the Glacial period, and 
all the evidence points to the conclusion that man was living during 
the many alternations of climate of that period, and whenever the 
glaciers retreated, followed them up closely. 

Thus far we have been going on certain and ascertained facts, 
confirmed by such numerous and well-authenticated proofs that doubt 
is impossibie. But we get on less certain ground when we try to 
trace back human origin to more remote periods. As regards this 
question, we must begin by describing shortly the geological periods 
during which the existence of man may have been possible. It is use- 
less to go back beyond the Chalk, which was deposited in a deep 
“ocean and forms a great break between the modern and the Secondary 
‘period, in which latter reptiles predominated, and mammalia are only 
known by a few remains of small insectivorous and marsupial animals. 

The inauguration of the present state of things commences with 
the Tertiary period. This has been divided into three stages: the 
Kocene, in which the first dawn appears of animal life similar in type to 
that now existing; the Miocene, in which there isastill greater approxi- 
mation to existing forms of life; and the Pliocene, in which existing 
types and species become preponderant. Then comes the Pleistocene 
or Quaternary, including the great Glacial period, during which the 
whole marine and nearly the whole terrestrial fauna are of ex- 
isting or recently extinct species, though very different in their 
geographical distribution from that of the present day. And finally 
we arrive at the recent period, when the present climate and the pres- 
ent configuration of lands, seas, and rivers, prevail with very slight 
modifications, and no changes have taken place either in the specific 
character or geographical distribution of life, except such as can be 
clearly traced to existing causes such as the agency of man. 

This is the geological frame-work into which we have to fit the his- 
tory of man’s appearance upon earth. We have traced him through 
the recent and Quaternary, can we trace him further into the Tertiary? 
Speaking generally we may say that the Eocene period was that in 
which Europe began to assume something like its present configura- 
tion, and in which mammalian life, of the higher or placental type, 
began to supplant the lower forms of marsupial life which had pre- 
ceded them. But these higher types were for the most part of a more 
primitive or generalized character than the more specialized types of 


w 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 81 


later periods, and the highest order, that of the primates, which in- 
cludes man, ape, and lemur, was, as far as is yet known, represented 
only by two or three extinct lemurian forms. 

The plan on which Nature has worked in the evolution of life 
seems always to have been this: she begins by laying down a sort of 
ground plan, orgeneralized sketch of a particular form of life, say first 
of vertebrata, then of fish, then of reptiles, and finally of mammalian life. 
This sketch resembles the simple theme of a few notes on which a musi- 
cian proceeds to work out a series of variations, each surpassing the other 
in complication and specialized development in some particular direc- 
tion. Now, in the Eocene period we are in the stage of the theme and 
first simple variations of the mammalian melody. It hardly seems 
likely, therefore, that a creature so highly specialized as man, even in 
his most rudimentary form, should have existed, and in the absence of 
any direct evidence to the contrary, itis safe to assume that his first 
appearance must have been of later date. 

But when we come to the Miocene and Pliocene periods, the case 
is different. It is true that in the Miocene the specialization of certain 
families, as for instance that of the horse, had not been carried out to 
the full extent, and that all the species of Miocene land-mammals and 
several of the genera are now extinct. But there were already true 
apes and baboons, and even two species of anthropoid ape, one of 
which, the Dryopithecus, whose fossil remains were found in the 
South of France, was as large as a man, and has been considered by 
some anatomists as in some respects superior to the chimpanzee or 
gorilla. 

Now, wherever anthropoid apes lived it is clear that, whether as 
a question of anatomical structure or of climate and surroundings, 
man, or some creature which was the ancestor of man, might have 
lived also. Anatomically speaking, apes and monkeys are as much 
Special variations of the mammalian type as man, whom they resemble 
bone for bone and muscle for muscle, and the physical animal man is 
simply an instance of the quadrumanous type specialized for erect 
posture and a larger brain. The larger brain, implying greater intelli- 
gence, must also have given him advantages in contending with out- 
ward circumstances, as for instance, by fire and clothing against cold, 
which might enable him to survive when other species succumbed and 
became extinct. ; 

If he could survive, as we know he did, the adverse conditions 
and extreme vicissitudes of the Glacial period, there is no reason why he 
might not have lived in the semi-tropical climate of the Miocene period, 
when a genial climate extended even to Greenland and Spitzbergen, 
and when ample forests supplied an abundance of game and edible 
fruits. The same reasons apply, with still greater force, to the 
Pliocene period, when existing types and species had become more 
common and when a mild climate still prevailed. The existence of 
Tertiary man must antecedently be pronounced highly probable; but 
probabilities are not proofs, and the fact of such existence must be 
determined by the evidence. All that can be said is that while there 
ought to be great caution in admitting as established a fact of such 
importance, there ought to be no determined predisposition to dis- 
believe it, like that which for 80 many years retarded the acceptance 
of the evidence for Paleolithic man. On the contrary, the fact that 
man existed in such numbers and under such conditions as have been 


82 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


described in the Quaternary period, establishes a strong presumption 
that his first appearance must date from a much earlier period. 

Let us see how the evidence stands. Undoubted stone implements, 
and bones bearing traces of cuttings by flint knives, have been found 
in strata at St. Prest, near Chartres, which were always considered to 
be Phlocene. Since the discovery, however, some geologists have: 
contended that these strata are not Pliocene, but of the earliest. 
Quaternary or perhaps a transition period between Pliocene and 
Quaternary. This evidence cannot, therefore, be accepted as conclu- 
sive for anything more than proof that man’s existence extends at any 
rate over the whule Quaternary period, comprising the vast glacial and 
inter-glacial ages which have effected such changes in the earth’s. 
surface. 

The next piece of evidence is from Italy, where bones of the 
Balenotus, a sort of Pliocene whale, have been discovered in strata 
undoubtedly Pliocene, which bear marks of incisions which to alk 
appearance must have been made by flint knives employed in hacking 
off the flesh. Doubts were thrown at first on this, as it was thought 
that possibly fish, or some gnawing animal like the beaver, might have. 


av) ‘ 
A SLL 4, 


pierce 


San 


vy 


ry 
















on | 








lex pike, iad Davari : 
1 vA Ns ¥ 1 
[LB ie Sona VA ON 
Sse SNe AG? 4 hong Pee eet 
LOM La Acti Pay 
Le MeN RY 
ay, 





InciseED Bonrs or Bauznotus. Pliocene. From Monte Aperto, Italy. 
Figured by Quartrefages, ‘‘ Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages,” p. 93. 


cut the grooves with their teeth. But later specimens have beer 
found on which the cuts havea regular curvature which could not 
have been made by any teeth, and present precisely the same appear- 
ance as the cuts which are so commonly found on the bones of reindeer 
and other animals in hundreds of Paleolithic caves. 

M. Quatrefages, who is a very eminent and at the same time very 
cautious authority, says, in his last work on the subject published. 
in 1884, “Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages,” that “the most 
incredulous must be convinced. The hand of man armed witha. 
cutting instrument could alone have left marks of this sort on a plain 
surface. Itis evident that some horde of savages of these remote 
times has found the carcase of this great cetacean stranded on the 
shore, and cut the flesh off with stone knives just as the savages of 
Australia do at the present day.” In fact incredulity only exists 
because this is as yet a solitary instance of Pliocene man, and scientific 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 83 


men, feeling that if true, further evidence must soon be found, very 
properly endeavor to keep their judgment in suspense. — 

If these bones of the Balzenotus really bear marks of human 
tools, the spectacle which might have been witnessed on the shore 
of the Pliocene sea perhaps 500,000 years ago, must have closely 
resembled that given by Sir John Lubbock from a description by 
Captain Grey of a recent whale feast in Australia. “When a whale 
is washed on shore itis areal godsend to them. Fires are immedi- 
ately lit, to give notice of the joyful event. Then they rub themselves 
all over with blubber, and anoint their favorite wives in the same way; 
after which they cut down through the blubber to the beef, which 
they sometimes eat raw and sometimes broil on pointed sticks. As 
other natives arrive they ‘fairly eat their way into the whale, and you 
see them climbing in and about the stinking carcass, choosing tidbits.’ 
For days ‘they remain by the carcass, rubbed from head to foot with 
stinking blubber, gorged to repletion with putrid meat—out of temper 
from indigestion, and therefore engaged in con- 
stant frays—suffering from acutaneous disorder 
by high feeding—and altogether a disgusting spec- 
tacle. There is no sight in the world,’ Captain 
Grey adds, ‘more revolting than to see a young 
and gracefully-formed native girl stepping out of 
the carcase of a putrid whale.’” 

The evidence for Miocene man is much of the 
same character; very strong and conclusive as far 
as it goes, but resting on too few instances to be A Say 
universally accepted. In 1868 the Abbé Bourgeois Fuimr§ navzr 
laid before the Anthropological Congress at Paris From Thenay. Miocene 
certain flints which he had found ém situ in un- Figured by Quatrefages 
doubted Miocene strata at Thenay, in the Beauce, ‘‘ Hommes Fossiles et. 
near Blois. They were received with general “O™™eS SNA 
; : ; p. 92. 
incredulity, and the traces of human design were 
denied. The Abbé, however, persisted, and having made fresh 
discoveries the subject was referred to the next meeting of the Congress. 
at Brussels, who appointed a commission of fifteen of the most emi- 
nent Kuropean authorities in such matters to report upon it. Nine 
reported that some of the flints showed undoubted traces of human 
workmanship, five were of an opposite opinion, and one was neutral. 
Since then fresh objects have been found and M. Quatrefages, who 
had formerly been doubtful, says in his recent work: “These new 
objects, and especially a scraper which is one of the most distinctly 
characterized of that class of implements, have removed my last 
doubts.” And certainly, if the figures given at page 92 of his 
“Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages” correctly represent the. 
original implements, and they really came from Miocene strata, doubt 
is no longer possible. The evidence of design in chipping into a 
determinate shape is quite as clear as in the similar class of implo- 
ments from Kent's Cavern or the Cave of La Madeleine. They must 
either have been chipped by man, or as Mr. Boyd Dawkins supposes, 
by the Dryopithecus or some other anthropoid ape which had a dose 
of intelligence so much superior to the gorilla or chimpanzee as to be 
able to fabricate tools. But in this case the problem would be solved. 
and the missing link discovered, for such an ape might well have been 
the ancestor of Paleolithic man. 





MIOCENE IMPLEMENTS FROM THENAY COMPARED WITH 
UNDOUBTED PALAOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS FROM 
QUATERNARY CAVES AND DRIFTS. 


MIOCENE, 


os 





Borer, oR AWL. 
_‘Thénay.” Miocene,, 
Congrés Préhistorique, 


Bruxelles, 18727 















































a : | " i; 
QUATERNARY. Chaleux, ScRAPER, OR RUDE As NN ; 
Belgium. Reindeer Period. KNIFE. Thenay. Mio- Xo are, 
Congrés Préhistorique, cene. Quatrefages, Scraper. Thenay. Miocends) 


Bruxelles, 1872. p. 92. Quatrefages, p. 92. 






















cae eae HWA 

idle isl if i 
oe 

\ {| i} 


My) ahr PRN Ay 

y) KC a i) 

ip We \\\\ AAR ih 
ay ae ald 











Le df 1 h 
ue i i 
MER Mean HAL HIER 
ee aay 


QuATERNARY., 
From Le Moustier, 






QuaTERNARY. - Mammoth ‘Period 
River Drift, Mesvin, Belgiam.. __ 
Corgrés Préhistoriqae, Bruxelles, 1872. 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 85 


The next instance is from the valley of the Tagus, where flint 
implements were alleged to have been discovered by an eminent Portu- 
guese geologist, Sefior Ribeiro, in Miocene strata. The subject was 
fully discussed on the spot, ata , 
meeting of the Anthropological 
Congress at Lisbon in 1880. The 
general opinion seemed to be that 
some of the implements showed f 
undoubted traces of human de- ;% 
sign, but some good authorities 
remained sceptical; and although 
there was no doubt that they were 
found in Miocene strata, it was 
thought possible that flints of 
Quaternary age might have fallen 
into fissures, or been mixed up 
with Miocene sands by floods at 
some very remote period, and thus 
become encrusted in a Miocene 
matrix. 

The verdict here, therefore, must 
be ‘Probable, but not proven.” 
The same will apply to the al- 
leged discovery of a human skull 
in California, buried under six 
distinct layers of hardened vol- 
canic ashes, and certainly of Plio- 
cene date, if not earlier. Whitney, 
the Director of the Geological 
Survey of the United States, and 
other American geologists, believe 
this skull to be Pliocene, but 
doubts have been thrown on its 
authenticity, and European geol- From Miocene strata of Tagus Valley. 
ogists do not generally accept it. Calta Ota Bee 3 

A human bone is described uartrefages ‘“‘ Hommes Fossiles et 
by Lyell, which was found near FIRE ESA SH 
Vicksburg in a side valley of the Mississippi, associated with bones of 
the extinct Mastodon and Megalonyx. But, although undoubtedly - 
of great antiquity, there is no proof that it does not belong to the 
Quaternary period, especially as the mastodon seems to have lived 
until comparatively recent times in America, its remains being often 
found in recent bogs and peat mosses. 

The same remark will apply to the skull which was found in 
digging a well at New Orleans, under six distinct layers of cypress 
forests such as are now growing on the surface, showing as many 
periods of successive subsidences, subsequent elevations, and station- 
ary periods long enough to allow of a forest growth of many genera- 
tions of large trees. Here again the antiquity must be very great, 
but we have no reason to carry it back into Tertiary periods, or beyond 
the recent period when the Mississippi began to flow in its present 
course and form its present delta. 

Human remains have also been discovered in caves in Brazil 
associated with bones of extinct animals, but we have no clear infor- 





86 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


mation as to the time when these animals became extinct, or as to the 
exact order of superposition in which the human skulls and implements 
were found, and the occurrence of a polished stone celt in the same cave 
throws still more doubt on their extreme antiquity. 

The existence of Tertiary man must for the present be considered 
as resting on three instances: 

1. The undoubted flint implements and cut bones (including 
those of the Hlephas meridionalis, a Pliocene and Miocene 
species) of St. Prest. 

2. The cut bones of the Balenotus from the Pliocene strata of 
Monte Aperto in Italy, the cuts on which appear to have been 
undoubtedly made by the hand of man armed with a sharp 
cutting stone implement. 

3. The flints from the Miocene strata of Thenay, some of which 
show unmistakable signs of having been split by fire and 
chipped into shape by design. i 

On the other hand the evidence is entirely negative, that a large 
number of fossil animal remains have been found in various parts of 
the world, specially in the Pliocene of the Cromer forest bed, and the 
Miocene of the Sewalik hills, Pikermi and Nebraska, without finding 
any trace of man. Thisis true, and is sufficient to make us require 
great caution in admitting as fully established a fact of so much impor- 
tance, which would carry back the antiquity of man from one or two 
hundred thousand years to at least a million. But the example of 
Quaternary man shows the:danger of trusting too exclusively to 
negative evidence. Thirty years ago the negative evidence against his 
existence was considered conclusive. Now his remains have been 
found over the whole world and in thousands of instances. 

It must be remembered, also, that remains of Tertiary man are 
not likely to be abundant. If man was then living, it was probably 
in fewer numbers and in more limited areas. The pressure of popu- 
lation had not yet driven wandering hordes to follow sea-coasts and 
cross rivers and mountains in pursuit of food. Probably ai this early 
period man lived more on fruits, and therefore required fewer imple- 
ments, and his intelligence was less, so that he had less power of 
fashioning them. For the purposes for which his Paleolithic descen- 
dents chipped stones into shape, he may have used natural stones 
which would often answer the purpose, but which, when thrown away, 
would leave nothing by which they could be recognized. 

If the forests now inhabited by the gorilla and chimpanzee were 
submerged and again elevated, no trace would be found of the ex- 
istence of animals which had built rude nests, used broken branches 
of trees as clubs, and cracked cocoa-nuts with hammer stones. 

But above all, the surface of these older strata has been so much 
denuded, that the situations in which alone we might expect to find 
remains of man have almost entirely disappeared. Ninety-nine hun- 
dredths of our Quaternary implements come from river drifts or 
caves. Where are the Pliocene or Miocene rivers or caves? They 
have disappeared amidst the revolutions of the earth's surface and the 
constant denudation which wastes continents away. ‘The negative 
evidence would be strong if we could point to caves filled with bone- 
breccias of a Pliocone or Miocene fauna, in which no trace was found 
of human remains. But it is weak as against even a single well- 
ascertained instance, if it merely amounts to such remains not being 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 87 


frequently found where we could hardly expect to find them. And it 
is weak against the strong presumption that when Quaternary man is 
found in such numbers and under such conditions, spread over wide 
areas in inhospitable climates, hemust have had his first origin in earlier 
times. It is, therefore, in the highest degree probable that this origin 
must have been in Tertiary times, when we know as a certain fact that 
Jarge anthropoid apes were already in existence. 

If this were so, what would it teach us as to the date of man’s 
appearance? : 

Reckoning by the thickness of the different stratified deposits 

which make up the earth’s crust, and assuming the average rate of 
their deposition, or what is the same thing, the average rate of waste 
of land surface to have been the same throughout, the whole Tertiary 
period carries us back barely one-twentieth part of the way towards the 
first beginnings of fossil-bearing strata. That is, if 100,000,000 years 
have elapsed since the earth became sufficiently solidified to support 
vegetable and animal life, the Tertiary period may have lasted for 
5,000,000 years; or for 10,000,000 years, if the life-sustaining order of 
things has lasted, as Lyell supposes, for at least 200,000,000 years. 
Even if we take the shorter period, the time is ample for the enormous 
changes which have taken place since the commencement of the Eocene 
period. The average rate of denudation over the globe has been taken 
at about one foot in 3,000 years, from actual calculations of the 
average amount of solid matter carried down by the Mississippi and 
other great rivers. Now at this rate it would take only 2,000,000 years 
to wear the whole of Europe down to the sea-level, and, in the absence 
of any compensating movements of elevation, the whole of North 
America would be washed away and deposited in strata at the bottom 
of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in less than 3,000,000 years. 
| If, therefore, the origin of man could be traced down to the mid- 
dle Miocene, or even to the date of the great anthropoid Dryopithecus 
of Southern France, we should have to assume a period for his exist- 
ence of probably between one and two millions of years, a mere 
fraction of the time since the earth became the abode of life and exist- 
ing causes operated to bring about geological formations. 
: As regards the habits and manners of Quaternary man we know 
very little that is positive, and can only gather some vague indications 
from the relics of caves and river drifts. 'These, however, are suffi- 
cient to establish with certainty that the law of his existence has been 
one of continued progress. The older the remains, the ruder are the 
implements and the fewer the traces of anything approaching to civili- 
zation. In the Neolithic period man is comparatively civilized. He 
has domestic animals and cultivated plants; he has clothing and orna- 
ments, well-fashioned tools and pottery, and permanent dwellings. 
He lives in societies, builds villages, buries his dead, and shows his 
faith in a future life by placing with them food and weapons. As we 
ascend the stream of time these indications of an incipient civilization 
disappear. The first vestige of the domestic animals is found in the 
dog which gnawed the bones of the Danish kitchen-middens, and of 
the earliest Swiss lake-dwellings. When fairly in Paleolithic times 
even the dog disappears, and man has to trust to his own unaided 
efforts in hunting wild animals for food. 

Weapons and implements become more and more rude until, in 
the oldest deposits, we find nothing but roughly-chipped hatchets, 


88 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


arrow-heads, flakes, and scrapers. Implements of bone, such as barbed 
harpoons, borers, and needles, which are abundant in the midde 
Paleolithic or reindeer period, become ruder and disappear. Pottery, 
which is extremely abundant in the Neolithic period, either disap- 
pears altogether or becomes so scarce that it is a moot question 
whether a few of the rudest fragments found in caves are really 
Paleolithic. If so, they clearly date from the later Paleeolithic, and 
pottery was unknown in the earlier Paleolithic times. 

Judging from the portraits engraved on bone during the reindeer 
period, Paleolithic man pursued the chase in a state of nature, though. 
from the presence of bone needles it is probable that the skins of. 
animals may have been occasionally sewed together by split sinews to 
provide clothing. There can be no doubt that his habitual dwelling 
was in caves or rock-shelters. Here was his home, here he took his. 
meals and allowed the remains of Iiis food to accumulate. His staple: 
diet consisted of the contemporary wild animals, the mammoth, the. 
rhinoceros, the cave bear, the horse, the aurochs, and the reindeer. 
Even the great cave lion was occasionally killed and eaten, and the fox: 
and other smaller animals were not despised; while among tribes skilled 
in the use of the bow and arrow, birds were a common article of food,. 
and fish were harpooned by those who lived near rivers. Wild fruit. 
and roots were also doubtless consumed, and from the formation of 
his teeth and intestines it is probable that if we could trace the diet of 
the earliest races of men we should find them to have been frugivorous,, 
like their congeners the anthropoid apes. 

The abundance of wild animals and the long period for which. 
hunting savages inhabited the same spots may be inferred from the 
fact that at one station alone, that of Solutré in Burgundy, it is com- 
puted that the remains of no less than 40,000 horses have been found. 
All the long bones of the larger animals have been split to extract the. 
marrow, which seems, as with the modern Eskimos and other savages,, 
to have been a great delicacy, and also used for softening skins for the: 
purpose of clothing. 

Among the split bones a sufficient number of human bones have: 
been found to make it certain that Palecolithic man was, occasionally at. 
least, a cannibal; and in several caves, notably that of Chaleux, in 
Belgium, these bones, including those of women and children, have been 
found, charred by fire, and in such numbers as to indicate that they 
had been the scene of cannibal feasts. It is a remarkable fact that. 
cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in 
civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times, 
they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the 
mammoth and the reindeer. 

As regards religious ideas they can only be inferred from the relics’ 
buried with the dead, and these are scarce and uncertain for the earlier 
periods. The caves in which Paleolithic man lived on the flesh of the: 
Quaternary animals, have been so often used as burying-places in long- 
subsequent ages, that it is extremely difficult to ascertain whether the: 
skeletons found in them are those of the original inhabitants. Thus 
the famous cave of Aurignac, in which Lartet thought he had discovered 
the tomb of men at whose funeral feasts mammoths and rhinoceroses. 
were consumed, is now generally considered to be a Neolithic burying- 
place superimposed on an abandoned Paleolithic habitation. 

There are not more than five or six well authenticated instances 


MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 89: 


i 

in which entire Paleolithic skeletons have been found under circum- 
stances in which there is a fair presumption that they may have 
been interred after death, and these afford no clear proof of articles. 
- intended for use in a future life having been deposited with them. 
All we can say, therefore, is that from the commencement of the 
Neolithic period downwards, there is abundant proof that man had 
ideas of a future state of existence very similar to those of most of 
the savage tribes of the present day; such proof is wanting for the. 
immensely longer Paleolithic period, and we are left to conjecture. 
The only arts which can with certainty be assigned to our earliest 
known ancestors are those of fire and of fashioning rude implements 
from stone by chipping. Everything beyond this is the product of 
gradual evolution. 





CHAPTER VI. 
MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE. 


LTHOUGH the establishment of the great antiquity of the: 
human race has attracted more immediate attention, being a 
fact at once intelligible to the general public, the researches of anato- 
mists and physiologists, aided by the microscope, have brought to 
light results quite as remarkable as regards the individual man and 
his place in Nature. Until recently it was taken for granted that man 
was a Special miraculous creation, altogether superior to and distinct. 
from the rest of the animal world. This assumption, gratifying alike: 
to our vanity and our laziness in the laborious search for truth, 
has been to a great extent disproved and replaced by the Law of 
Evolution. 

The most striking proof of this is found when we trace scienti- 
fically the growth of each individual man 
from his first origin to his final development. 
Man, like all other animals, is born of an 
egg. The primitive egg, or ovum, which 
was the first germ of our existence, is a 
small cell about the one-hundredth of an 
inch in diameter, consisting of a mass of 
semi-fluid protoplasm enclosed in a mem- 
brane, and containing a small speck or nu- 
cleus of more condensed protoplasm. This 
nucleated cell is itself the first form into 
which a mass of simple jelly-like protoplasm 
is differentiated in the course of its evolution from its original uniform: 
composition. The nucleated cell is the starting-point of all higher 
life, and by splitting up and multiplying repetitions of itself in 
geometrical progression, provides the cell material out of which all 
the complicated structures of living things are built up. In sexual 
generation, which prevails in all the higher forms of life, this process: 
requires, in order to start it, the co-operation of two such cells or 
germs of life, one male, the other female. , 

The first remarkable fact is that the human egg is, at its com- 
mencement, undistinguishable from that of any other mammal, and 





Human Eac. 
Magnified 100 times, 


‘90 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


remains so for a long period of its growth, going through its earlier 
stages of development in precisely the same way. At first the egg 
behaves exactly as any other single-celled organism, as for instance 
that of the amceba, which is considered the simplest form of organized 
life. It contracts in the middle and divides into two cells, each with 
‘its nucleus and each an exact counterpart of the original cell. These 
two subdivide into four, the four into eight, and so on, until at last a 
‘cluster of cells is formed which is called a morula from its resemblance 
to the fruit of the mulberry-tree. Development goes on, and the 
globular lump of cells changes into a globular bladder whose outside 
skin is built up of flattened cells. Then condensation takes place, 
from the more rapid growth of cells at particular points, and the 
foundation is laid of the actual body of the germ or embyro, the 
other cells of the germ-bladder serving only for its nutrition. Up to 
‘this point the germs not only of all mammals including man, but 





Mammatian Eaa. 
First Stage. Second Stage. Third Stage. 


‘of all vertebrate animals, birds, reptiles, and fishes, are scarcely 
distinguishable. 

In the next stage the outer surface of the embyro develops three 
‘distinct layers, the “outer one of which, or epidermis, becomes the 
-outer skin; the inner one, or epithelium, the mucous membrane or 
lining of all the intestinal organs; and the intermediate layer the raw 
‘material of muscles, bones, and blood-vessels. The embyro is now 
‘contracted in the middle and assumes the form of a violin-shaped disc, 
-and a slight longitudinal furrow appears, dividing it into two equal 
right and left parts, which is gradually converted into a tube con- 
taining the spinal marrow, to protect which a chain of bones or 
~vertebre is developed, forming the back-bone. 

And now comes what is the most marvellous part of the process, 
--viz., the development of the brain, eye, ear, and other organs of 
sense, from these simple elements. The brain begins as a swelling of | 
the foremost end of the cylindrical marrow-tube. This divides itself 
‘into five bladders, lying one behind the other, from which the whole 
‘complicated structure of the brain and skull is subsequently developed. 

The eye, ear, and other sense-organs, begin in the same way. A 
‘slight depression in the outer skin extends until the edges close and 
‘form a hollow space in which the eye is formed. At first it is a mere 
black pigment mark on the interior surface of the inclosed space, 
which develops into the retina, with a wonderful apparatus of optic 
nerves for conveying impressions photographed on it to the brain. 
The enclosed space itself is filled with a fluid, or vitreous humor, from 


MANS PLACE IN NATURE. 91 


which a lens is condensed for collecting the rays of light and con- 
centrating them on the retina, and by degrees all the beautiful and 
complicated organs are evolved for perfecting the work of the eye and 
protecting it from injury. But this fact must be kept clearly in view: 
the process is identically the same as that by which the eyes of other 
animals are formed, and its various stages represent those by which 
the organs of vision have gradually risen to the development of a com- 
plete eye, in advancing from the lowest to the higher forms of life. 
Thus in the lowest, or Protista, the eye remains a simple pigment 
spot, which probably perceives ight by being more sensitive to varia- 
tions of temperature than the surrounding white cells. The next 
higher family develop a lens, and so on in ascending order, different 
families developing different contrivances for attaining the same ob- 
ject, but all starting from the same origin, development of the cells of 
the epidermis, and leading up tothe same result, organs of vision 
adapted for the ordinary conditions of life of the creature which uses 
them. I say the ordinary conditions, for there are curious instances 
of the eye persisting, dwindling from disuse, and finally disappearing, 
in animals which live underground like the mole, or in subterranean 
waters like some fish in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky and under- 
ground lakes of Carinthia, where the stimulus of light is no longer felt 
for many generations. 





Doe (six weeks). Man (eight weeks). 
From Haeckel’s ‘‘ Schopfungsgeschichte.”’ 


The history of the ear and other organs of sense is the same as that 
ofthe eye. They are all developments of the cell system of the outer 
skin, and all pass through stages of development identical with those 
at which it has been arrested in the progression from lower to higher 
forms of life. The same principles apply to the development of the 
inner organs, such as the heart, lungs, liver, etc., a striking illustration 
of which is found in the fact that the gill arches, or bones which sup- 
port the gills by which fishes breathe, exist originally in man and all 
other vertebrate animals above the ranks of fish, but, in the develop- 


92 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT: 


ment of the embryo, they are superseded by the air-breathing 
apparatus of lungs, and converted to other purposes in the formation of 
the jaws and organ of hearing. In fact, we may say that every human 
being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at. 
that of mammal, and finally of man. 

If we take him up at the more advanced stage, where the embryo has: 
already passed the reptilian form, we find that for a considerable time: 
the line of development remains the same as that of other mammalia.. 
The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar, the five fingers and toes 
develop in the same way, and the resemblance after the first four 
weeks’ growth between the embryo of a man and a dog is such that 
it is scarcely possible to distinguish them. LHven at the age of eight 
weeks the embryo man is an animal with a tail, hardly to be distin- 
guished from an embryo puppy. 

As evolution proceeds the embryo emerges from the general 
mammalian type into the special order of Primates to which man 
belongs. This order, beginning with the lemur, rises through the 
monkey, the baboon, and tailed ape, up to the anthropoid apes, the 
chimpanzee, gorilla, and orang, which approach nearest to the human 
type. The succession is gradual from the lower to the higher forms 
up to the anthropoid apes, but a considerable gap occurs between 
these and man. It is true that in his physical structure man 
resembles these apes closely, every bone and muscle of the one having 
its counterpart in those of the other. But even at its birth the 
human infant is already specialized by considerable differences. The 
brain is larger, its convolutions more complex, the spine has a double 
curvature, adapting it for an erect posture, and the legs, with a cor- 
responding object, are longer and stronger, while the arms are shorter 
and less adapted for climbing. The thumb also is longer, making the 
hand a better instrument for all purposes, except that of clasping the 
branches of trees, for which the long, slender fingers of the ape are 

‘more available. The great toe also is less flexible and the foot more 
adapted for giving the body a firm support and less for being used as 
a hand. 

As growth proceeds after birth these differences become more and 
more accentuated. The infant chimpanzee is not so very unlike the 
infant negro, but after a certain age the sutures of the skull close in 
the former, making the skulla solid box, which prevents further ex- 
pansion of the brain, and the growth of the bone is directed towards 
the lower part of the face, giving the animal a projecting muzzle, 
massive jaws, and a generally bestial appearance, while at the same 
time its intelligence is arrested and its ferocious instincts become 
more prominent. Still these higher apes remain creatures of very 
considerable intelligence and warm affections, as may be seen in the 
behavior of those which have been caught young and brought up 
under the influence of kind treatment. There is a chimpanzee now in 
the Zodlogical Gardens at Regent’s Park, which can do all but speak, 
which understands almost every word the keeper says to it, and when 
told to sing will purse out its lips and make an attempt to utter con- 
nected notes. In the native state they form societies, obey a chief, 
and often show great sagacity in their manner of foraging for food and 
escaping from danger. 

Even in lower grades of life than the anthropoid apes we can see 
plainly many of the germs of human faculties in an undeveloped state. 


MANS PLACE IN NATURE. 93 


Those who are fond of dogs, and have lived much with them and 
understood their ways, must have been struck by the many human- 
like qualities they possess, and especially by the very great resemblance 
between young dogs and young children. They both like and dislike 
very much the same people and the same mode of treatment. They 
like those who take notice of them, caress them, talk to them, and, 
above all, those whom they can approach with perfect confidence of 
receiving uniform kind treatment. They dislike those who have no 
sympathy with them, or whose treatment of themis either cold or 
capricious. Their great delight is to play with one another, and often 
to tease and make a pretence of quarreling and fighting. They both 
have an instinct for mischief, and are constantly trying it on how far 
they can go without getting into serious difficulties. 

Later in life, and in more serious matters, the dog has certainly 
the germs of intelligence, and does a number of things which require 
a certain exercise of reasoning power. He has a good memory, and 
imagination enough to be excited at the prospect of a walk where 
there is a chance of finding a rat or a rabbit, and to dream of chasing 
imaginary rabbits when he is lying curled up on the hearthrug. Hvery 
dog has an individual character of his own as clearly defined as that 
of an individual man, nor can the rudiments of consciousness be 
denied to the hound who, ina kennel of twenty others, knows per- 
fectly well that he is Rover, and not Rattler or Ranger, and waits till 
his name is called to come forward for a biscuit. When he has got it, 
his sense of property makes him appropriate it as his own, and respect 
the biscuits appropriated to other dogs, at any rate to the extent of 
knowing perfectly well that he is doing wrong if he takes them by force 
or steals them. 

In the moral qualities the dog approaches even more closely to 
man. His fidelity, affection, and devotion even to death, are proverbial. 
He feels shame and remorse when he has departed from the canine 
sense of right and wrong or from the canine standard of honor, and is 
happy when he feels that he has done his duty. What is this but the 
working of an elementary conscience? Even in the higher sphere of 
religious feeling, the dog feels unbounded love and reverence for the 
master who is the highest being conceivable to him, or in other words, 
his God; and he shudders as that master does in the presence of any- 
thing weird and supernatural. Every good ghost story begins by 
describing how the dogs howled and shrank to their master’s feet when 
the first shadow of supernatural presence was cast on the haunted 
castle. 

Capacity for progressive improvement can hardly be denied to a 
race which has developed such qualities from ancestors who, like the 
wild and half-wild dogs of Asia and America, had not even learncd to 
bark, and were as unlike the civilized and affectionate collie, as Palzo- 
lithic man to his modern successor. In fact, the progress of the dog 
seems only to be limited by the want of organs of speech, and of an 
instrument like the hand by which to place himself in closer relation 
with the outer world. 

The same remarks apply to the elephant, whose great sagacity 
seems clearly attributable to the possession of such an instrument in 
the trunk, inferior no doubt to the hand, but still very superior to the 
paw of the dog or to the hoof-enclosed fore-foot of the horse. In all 
animals the greater or less perfection of the instruments by which they 


94. MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


act upon and are acted upon by the outer world, seems to be the 
principal factor in determining the quality of the brain as an organ of 
intelligence. 

In the insect world we find still more wonderful exemplifications: 
of the resemblance between animal and human intelligence. Ants live 
in organized societies, build cities, store up food for winter, keep 
aphides as milk-cows, carry on slave-hunting raids, and push the 
division of labor to such an extent that some tribes are all workers, 
others all warriors and slave-owners. These actions are not all merely 
mechanical and instinctive, for ants can to a considerable extent adapt 
themselves to circumstances, and alter their habits and mode of life 
when it becomes necessary in the “struggle for existence.” The same 
is true of bees, beetles, and other insects, but it is useless to dwell on 
these, for the organization of the insect world is so different from that 
of the mammalian, to which man belongs, that no safe analogy can be 
drawn from one to the other. It is from the higher mammalian types 
that we can fairly draw the inference that, if like effects are produced 
by like causes, the more perfect intelligence, consciousness, and 
morality of man, must be the same in kind though higher in degree 
than the less perfect manifestations of the same qualities in animals of 
similar though less perfect physical organization. 

There is one respect in which the human infant differs greatly 
from the young of other animals, viz., in the long period for which it 
remains ina condition of utter helplessness. In many of the lower 
forms of life the young creature emerges into the world with many of 
its necessary faculties complete, and has to learn comparatively little 
from education. The chicken runs about and picks up food on the day 
it escapes from the egg, and the young flycatcher will peck at flies 
with fragments of the shell still adhering to it. As we rise in the 
scale of creation, these instinctive aptitudes become fewer, and more 
time is required before the young animal can shift for itself; and at 
length, in the human infant, we arrive at a stage where for the first: 
year or two it can do little to preserve its existence except to breathe 
and suck. | 

The reason of this is doubtless to be found in the higher develop- 
ment to which it is destined to attain. The faculties of every 
animal depend on two causes—first, heredity, or those which have been 
evolved from the type, and become fixed by succession through a long 
series of ancestors; secondly, adaptation, or those which are acquired 
by education, including in the term everything that is requisite to: 
place the animal in harmony with its surrounding environment. The 
first are what are called instincts, which exist from the birth, and are 
preserved unconsciously and without an effort. The last involve an 
effort, and reference from the outer stations of the senses along the. 
telegraph wires called nerves, to the central office of the brain, where. 
the message is recorded and the reply considered and transmitted 
along another set of nerves to the muscles, where it translates itself’ 
into action. In either case the fundamental fact seems to resolve: 
itself into a tendency of molecular motion to follow beaten rather than 
unknown paths. What the brain has once thought or perceived, it. 
will think or perceive more readily a second time, and in like manner,. 
a message which has once been transmitted and read off along a nerve, 
from muscle to brain or from brain to muscle, will be transmitted and’ 
read off more readily by practice, until at length it ceases to require: 


MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 95 


conscious effort and becomes instinctive. _We may see an illustration. 
of this in the facility with which a piano player, who began by learn- 
ing the notes with difficuity, acquires such aptitude that the execution 
of rapid passages becomes mechanical, and can be carried on without. 
a mistake, even when the performer is thinking of something else or 
talking toa bystander. 

The outer world with which every animal has to deal from its birth. 
upwards, may be compared to a dense forest or jungle through which 
it has to find its way. A certain number of paths have been cut by its. 
ancestors, and it finds them ready made by heredity; others it con- 
structs for itself by repeated efforts until they become as broad and’ 
easy as those which it inherited; and finally, if the forest is thick and its: 
area extensive it can only be explored by leaving the beaten paths. 
of inherited or acquired instinct, and groping the way painfully by 
conscious effort and attention. 

We can now see why the lower the animal, or in other words the 
less extensive the forest, the whole vital energy may be concentrated: 
on the few beaten paths opened by heredity, and a few necessary 
actions may be performed from'the first, instinctively and with great: 
perfection, while in higher organisms the vital energy is employed in 
developing a great mass of future possibilities rather than a small 
number of inferior present realities. The baby cannot run about the 
room and feed itself like the chicken, because the baby has to grow 
into a man or woman, while the chicken has only to grow into a fowl 
which can do very little more in its adult than in its infant state. 

In fact, when we come to analyze the sum of faculties of the adult. 
man, we find that they are derived to a surprisingly small extent from 
heredity as compared with education. In saying this, however, it. 
must be understood that the term “heredity” is limited to that direct. 
heredity which transmits characters by instinctive necessity, and not 
to the far larger sphere of indirect heredity by which faculties, arts, 
modes of thought, and rules of conduct, are accumulated in civilized 
societies, and become the principal instrument of education in its: 
larger sense. If it were possible to suppose a human infant born of 
civilized parents, left entirely to itself, what would it grow into? Per- 
haps it would learn to walk, though this is not quite certain, as the 
few wild children who have been discovered in forests, went very 
much on all fours, and if we can believe the accounts of wolf children 
in India, those educated among wolves adopt their gait and habits; 
certainly it would not learn to speak, in the sense of using any articu- 
late language; its arts would not extend beyond recognizing a few 

articles of food, and perhaps using stones to crack nuts, and con- 

‘structing some rude shelter from branches of trees. It would know 
nothing of fire, and on the whole would not be so far advanced as its: 
oldest Paleolithic ancestor. 

As regards a moral sense, and all that we are accustomed to think 
the highest attributes of humanity, it is clear that his mind would be: 
a blank. Even ata much more advanced stage, such ideas evidently 
come from education, and are not the results either of inherited 
instinct or of supernatural gift. An English child kidnapped at an 
early age by Apache Indians or head-hunting Dyaks, would, to a cer- 
tainty, consider murder one of the fine arts, and the slaughter of an 
inoffensive stranger, especially if accomplished with a treachery that. 
made the exploit one of little risk, an achievement of the highest man- 


96 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


hhood. If brought up among Mahometans he would consider polyga- 
amy, if among the Todas polyandry, as the natural and proper relation 
of the sexes. All that can be said is, that if recaptured and brought 
back to civilized society, he would perhaps be assisted by heredity in 
adopting its ideas more readily than would. be the case if he had been 
Dorn a savage. 

It is clear, therefore, that the history of the individual man tells 


the same story of evolution from low beginnings as is told by that of | 


the human race as traced from Palseolithic, through Neolithic, into 
modern times. His law is progress, worked out by conscious effort 
called forth by the environment of outward circumstances, and acceler- 
ated from time to time by the successful efforts of a few superior men, 
whose greater sum of energy or happier organization for development, 
enables them to pioneer new paths through the vast unexplored 
forests of science, art, and morality. 

The difficulty of accounting for the development of intellect and 
morality by evolution is not so great as that presented by the differ- 
ence in physical structure between man and the highest animal. 
‘Given a being with man’s brain and man’s hand and erect stature, it is 
-easy to see how intelligence must have been gradually evolved, and 
rules of conduct best adapted for his own good and that of the society 
in which he lived must have been formed and fixed by successive 
generations, according to the Darwinian laws of the “struggle for 
life” and the “survival of the fittest.” 

But it is not so easy to see how this difference of physical struc- 
ture arose, and how a being came into existence which had such a 
-brain and hand, and such undeveloped capabilities for an almost 
unlimited progress. The difficulty is this: the difference in structure 
between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing 
ape is too great to admit of the possibility of one being the direct 
‘descendant of the other. The negro in some respects makes a slight 
‘approximation towards the Simian type. His skull is narrower, his 
‘brain less capacious, his muzzle more projecting, his arm longer than 
those of the average European man. Still he is essentially a man, 
and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or gorilla. Even 
the idiot or erétin, whose brain is no larger and intelligence no 
greater than that of the chimpanzee, is an arrested man and not an ape. 

If, therefore, the Darwinian theory holds good in the case of man 
and ape, we must go back to some common ancestor from whom both 
may have originated by pursuing different lines of development. But 
to establish this as a fact and not a theory we require to find that 
ancestral form, or, at any rate, some intermediate forms tending towards 
it. We require to find fossil remains proving for the genus man what 
the Hipparion and Anchitherium have proved for the genus horse, that 
is, gradual progressive specialization from a simple ancestral type to 
more complex existing forms. In other words, we require to discover 
the “ missing link.” Now it must be admitted that hitherto, not only 
have no such missing links been discovered, but the oldest known human 
skulls and skeletons, which date from the Glacial period, and are 
probably at least 100,000 years old, show no very decided approxima- 
tion towards any such pre-human type. On the contrary, one of the 
oldest types, that of the man of the sepulchral cave of Cro-Magnon, is 
that of a fine race, tall in stature, large in brain, and on the whole 
‘superior to many of the existing races of mankind. The reply of 


~ 


MANS PLACE IN NATURE. 97 


course is that the time is insufficient, and if man and the ape had a 
common ancestor, that as a highly developed anthropoid ape certainly, 
and man probably, already existed in the Miocene period, such ances- 
tor must be sought still further back, at a distance compared with 
which the whole Quaternary period sinks into insignificance. It is 
said also that the discovery of man’s antiquity is of quite recent date, 
and that thirty years ago the same negative evidence was quoted as 
conclusive against his existence in times and places which now afford 
his remains by tens of thousands. All thisis true, and it may well 
make us hesitate before we admit that man, whose structure is so 
analogous to that of the animal creation, whose embryonic growth is so 
strictly accordant with that of other mammals, and whose higher 
faculties of intelligence and morality are so clearly not miraculous 
instincts but the products of evolution and education, is alone an 
exception to the general law of the universe, and is the creature of a 
special creation. 

This is the more difficult to believe, as the ape family which man 
so closely resembles in physical structure, contains numerous branches 
which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ 
more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series. Ifa 
special creation is required for man, must there not have been special 
creations for the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang, and for at least 
100 different species of apes and monkeys which are all built on the 
same lines? 

What are the facts really known to us as to man, his nature, and 
his origin? 

Man is one of a species of which there are in round numbers 
some 1,200 millions of individuals living at the present time on the 
earth. Taking thirty years as the average duration of each generation 
there are thus over 3,000 millions who are born and die per century, 
and this has gone on more or less during the period embraced by his- 
tory which extends for a great part of the Old World over thirty 
centuries, in the case of Assyria and China over forty or fifty, and in 
Egypt over seventy centuries. At the commencement of these his- 
torical periods population was dense, probably in Egypt and Western 
Asia denser than at present, and civilization far advanced. The 
Pyramids, which are at the same time the oldest and the largest build- 
ings in the world, prove this conclusively, both from the mechanical 
skill and astronomical science shown in their construction, and from 
the great accumulation of capital and highly artificial arrangements of 
society which could alone have rendered such works possible. The 
great mass of the population in these olden times lived in what is 
known as the Old World, and was accumulated mainly in the great 
valley systems of the Nile, and of the various rivers and irrigated 
plains of the southern half of the continent of Asia. Northern Asia 
and Europe were thinly inhabited by ruder tribes. Of America and 
' the interior of Africa we know little until a much later date, but the 
populatian was in all probability sparse and savage, while in Australia, 
if it existed at all, it was still scantier and more savage; while in New 
Zealand and most of the Pacific Islands it has only been introduced 
by migration within comparatively recent times. 

_ The next leading fact we have to observe is that the human race 
is not everywhere the same, but is divided into several well-marked 
varieties. The most obvious distinction is that of color. In the Old 


98 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


World there are three distinct and clearly characterized groups—the 
white, the yellow, and the black. These are found mainly in three 
separate zodlogical provinces: the white in the temperate and north- 
temperate zones of Europe and Western Asia, the yellow in those of 
Eastern Asia, and the black in the tropical zone, principally of Central 
Africa. Where they are pure and unmixed, these race-types differ 
from one another not in color only but in many other important and 
permanent characters. The average size of the brain, the complexity 
of its convolutions, the shape of the skull, the bones of the face and 
jaws, the comparative length of the limbs, the structure of the 
hair and skin, the characteristic odor, the susceptibilities to various 
diseases, are all essentially different, so that no observant naturalist, 
or even observant child or dog, could ever mistake a Chinaman for 
a Negro, or a Negro for an Englishman. 

Such a naturalist, seeing for the first time typical specimens 
of the three races, would pronounce them without hesitation to be 
distinct species, and would predict with much confidence that they 
would either not cross, or, if they did, would produce a hybrid 
progeny of inferior fertility. 

But here he would be wrong, for, in fact, the most opposite races 
breed freely together, and produce a fertile progeny. 

Moreover, when we extend our view beyond the clearly distin- 
guished types of the white, yellow, and black, as seen in Caucasian, 
Mongoloid, and Negro races, we find these types breaking off into 
sub-types and shading off towards each other, while a large propor- 
tion of the human race consists of brown, red, olive, and copper- 
colored people, who may either be original varieties, or descn led 
from crosses between the primitive races. Small isolated groups «also 
crop up, differing from the main races, of whom it is hard to say from 
whom they are descended or how they got there; as for instance the 
Hottentots, in South Africa, the pigmy black Negritos of the Anda- 
mans and other South Asiatic islands, the Papuans and Australians, 
the hairy Ainos of Japan, and some of the aboriginal races of India. 

To a certain extent climate seems to have had an influence in 
creating or developing the main typical differences. Thus the main 
line of black races lies along the hot tropical belt of the earth Trom 
Old to New Guinea. But the rule is not universal, there is no similar 
type in tropical America, where a singular uniformity of type and color 
prevails throughout the whole continent. Even in Africa we find the 
Negro type, while retaining its black color, shading off towards higher 
types and losing its more animal-like characteristics. Again, while 
color becomes generally lighter as we pass from tropical to south- 
temperate and from south to north-temperate regions, if we go still 
further north we find darker races, such as the Lapps and Esquimaux, 
and in one remarkable instance the color within the temperate zone 
itself actually becomes darker with increase of latitude, and the 
aboriginal savage of Tasmania, in a climate like that of Devonshire, 
was blacker than many negroes. 

Even within great and well-defined races themselves there are 
clearly marked varieties. Thus the white race consists of the two 
distinct types of the fair-whites and dark-whites, the former pre- 
vailing in Northern Europe and the latter in Southern Europe, West- 
ern Asia, and North Africa; the contrast between a fair Swede with 
flaxen hair and blue eyes, and a swarthy Spaniard with black hair and 


MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 99 


eyes, being almost as marked as between the latter and some of the 
higher black or brown races. Throughout a great part of Europe, 
including specially England, it is evident that the existing population 
is derived mainly from repeated crosses of these two races with one 
another and probably with earlier races. 

In the existing state of things also it is evident 'that if the differ- 
ent races of mankind ever really did pass into one another under 
influences like those of climate, the time of their doing so is long 
past. A colony of English families transported to tropical Africa 
would to a certainty die out long before they had taken even the first 
step towards acquiring the black velvety skin, the woolly hair, the 
projecting muzzle, and the long narrow skull of the typical Negro, 
while a Negro colony transported to Scotland or Scandinavia would 
as certainly disappear from diseases of the chest and lungs, long 
before they began to vary towards the European type. The yellow 
race seems to be on the whole the best fitted to withstand climate and 
other external influences, and it certainly shows no signs anywhere 
of passing over either into the Caucasian or the Negro type. 

On the whole, therefore, if the fact of fertile inter-crossing is to 
be taken as proving the unity of the human race and their probable 
descent from a common ancestor, and we are to assume that all the 
great varieties which we find existing are the result of modifications 
gradually introduced by climate and surrounding circumstances, it 
is evident that the point of divergence must be put at an immense 
distance. 

This is the more certain, as when we look back for a period of 
more then 4,000 years, we find from the Egyptian monuments that. 
some of the best-marked existing types have undergone no sensible 
change. The portraits of negroes and of Semitic dark-whites painted 
on the walls of temples and tombs of the 12th dynasty, about 2,000 
B.c., might be taken as characteristic portraits of the negro and Jew 
of the present day, and the modern Egyptian fellah reproduces with 
little or no change the features of the Ancient Egyptians of the days. 
of Rameses and Amenophis. It is evident, therefore, that where no: 
great change has taken place from crossing of races, they will main- 
tain their special characters unaltered for more than 100 generations. 
Indeed we might say for 200 generations, for the statues and wooden 
statuettes from the tombs of Sakkara, the ancient Memphis, which 
certainly date back for more than 5,000 years, show us the Egyptian 
type in its highest perfection, and witha more intellectual and I 
might say modern expression than is found 1,000 or 2,000 years 
jJater, when the type of the higher classes had evidently deteriorated 
somewhat from a slight infusion of African elements. 

The same conclusion of the great distance at which any common 
point of divergence of the various races of mankind must be placed, is 
confirmed by a totally different line of inquiry, that into the origin of 
language. 

Philologists have clearly proved that languages did not spring 
into existence ready made, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter, but 
have followed the general law of Nature, and have had their periods of 
birth, growth, and evolution from simple into complex organism. 
Now there is a vast variety of languages, some say more than a thou- 
sand. <A large proportion of these are, of course, only what may be 
called dialects of the same original language, as in the case of the 


100 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


whole Indo-Huropean family, including Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, 
Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavonic, with all their offshoots and derived 
branches, as well as many others. These can be all traced back to 
the common root of the primitive language of an Aryan white race, 
who radiated by successive migrations from some region in the 
elevated plateaux of Central Asia. Any one who wants to be con- 
vinced of this has only to refer to Max Miiller’s works and trace the 
history of one verb, viz., that used to denote individual existence. 

Asmi in Sanscrit has become e¢mi in Greek, swm in Latin (whence 
sono, suis, and all the modern derivatives of Latin races), and “am” 
in English; while the Latin est, the Greek esti, and the German ist, 
are clearly akin to the original asti. It may help in understanding 
how language has been formed if we point out that “I am” originally 
meant “I breathe,” and “he is” is the more general and abstract form 
of “he stands.” 

But there are anumber of languages between which no such 
relationship can be traced, which are constructed on radically different 
principles, and have no resemblance with one another in their roots, 
or primitive sounds used to express objects and simple ideas, except in 
the few cases where it can be traced to importation from abroad, or to 
imitation of naturally suggested sounds, such as those which have led 
so many nations to express the idea of “mother” by a sound resem- 
bling the bleating of alamb. Obviously, similarity of sound in such 
words as are used for the ideas of father, mother, cow, crow, thunder, 
crack, splash, and so on, suggests no common origin, and as most, or 
at any rate a great many roots, were probably derived originally in 
this manner, though long since diverted to express other ideas by 
associations which it is impossible to trace, the wonder rather is that 
we should find so many languages with so few roots in common. The 
best authorities tell us that a list of fifty to one hundred languages 
could be made of which no one has been satisfactorily shown to be 
related to any other. 

The main distinction between languages, however, is to be found 
in their inner mechanism, or grammar, rather than in the mere dif- 
ference of root-sounds. The result of years of mechanical training in 
barbarous Latin and Greek grammars in our English public schools 
has been to leave the average Englishman completely ignorant of the 
real meaning of the word “grammar,” and almost incapable of com- 
prehending that it can mean anything else than a string of arbitrary 
rules to be learned by heart for the vexation of small boys. ; 

And yet grammar is really most interesting, as showing the modes 
by which the dawning human intellect has proceeded, at remote peri- 
ods and among different races, in working out the great problem of 
articulate speech, by which man rises into the higher regions of 
thought and is mainly distinguished from the brute creation. Con- 
sider first what the problem is, and then some of the principal modes 
which have been invented to solve it. 

Suppose some primitive race to have accumulated a certain stock 
of root-words, or simple sounds to signify definite objects and simple 
ideas, they must soon find that these alone are not sufficient to convey 
briefly and clearly to other minds the ideas which they wish to 
express. For instance, suppose a tribe’ had got root-words to express 
the ideas of ‘“‘man,” “bear,” and “kill.” What one of the tribe wants 
to convey from his own mind to that of his neighbor may be, “The 


MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE. 101 


man has killed the bear,” or “The bear has killed the man,” or “The” 
(or “A) man has killed a bear,” or “ bears,” or “ will” or “ may have” 
killed, and so on through a vast number of variations on the original 
three-note theme. Up to a certain point, a man might succeed in 
making himself understood by using his three root-sounds in a certain 
order, aided by the pantomime of accent and gesture; and the 
Chinese, though one of the oldest civilized peoples of the world, have 
scarcely got beyond this stage. But the process would be difficult 
and uncertain, and at length it would occur to some genius that such 
modifications as those of definite and indefinite, past and present, 
singular and plural, etc., were of general application, not to the par- 
ticular three or four roots which he wished to connect, but to all roots. 
The next step would be to invent a set of sounds which, attached in 
some way to the root-sounds, should convey to the hearer the sense in 
which it was intended that he should take them. 

This is the fundamental idea of grammar, but it has been worked 
out by different races in the most different manner. The Chinese and 
other allied races in the South-east of Asia, such as the Burmese and 
Siamese, have solved it in the simplest manner. Their languages are 
what is called monosyllabic—tbat is, each word consists of a single 
syllable, and is a root expressing the fundamental idea, without dis- 
tinction of noun from verb, active from passive, or other modifications. 
They have to trust, therefore, to express their meaning, mainly to 
syntax, or the order in which words succeed one another, which, up to 
a certain point, is the simplest method, and is largely adopted in 
modern English. Thus, “Man kill bear,” “Bear kill man,” convey the 
meaning just as clearly as the classical languages do by cases, when 
they distinguish whether the man is the killer or the killed by saying 
homo or hominem. But the monosyllabic system limits the nations 
who use it to an inconveniently small number of words, and fails in 
expressing their more complex relations, so that we find the same word 
in Chinese or Siamese often expressing the most different ideas, and the 
meaning can only be conveyed by supplementing the root-words and 
syntax by accent and other conventional signs which are akin to the 
primitive devices of gesture language. Thus, in Siamese, the syllable 
ha, according to the note in which it is intoned, may mean a pestilence, 
the number five, or the verb “ to seek.” 

This very primitive and almost infantine form of language is 
confined to one family, that of the Chinese and Indo-Chinese, who, it 
may be observed, are by no means simple or primitive in other respects, 
but stand and have stood for centuries at a comparatively high level of 
civilization. All other races, including the most savage, have adopted 
some form or other of grammar, #.e., of modifying original root-sounds 
by additional generic sounds of definite determination; but the devices 
on which they have hit for this purpose are most various. Thus, the 
grammar of the Aryan family of languages has been formed by reasoning 
out such general categories of thought as articles, pronouns, and prep- 
ositions, coining sounds for them and prefixing these sounds to the 
root-sounds as separate determinating signs. More complex shades of 
meaning are conveyed principally by inflections, 7.e., by adding certain 
generic new sounds to the the original root-word, and incorporating 
them with it so as to form modifications which are a sort of secondary 
words. Thus the ideas of present, past, and future love, loving, and 
being loved, lovely, and so on, are formed by transforming the root 


102 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGET. 


amo into such modifications as amor, amavi, amabo, amans, 
amabilis, etc. We can see this process in the course of formation in 
the change which converted the old English form “Cesar his” into 
the modern genitive “ Cesayr’s.” 

Other families again obtain the same results by very different 
processes. The Semitic languages, for instance, including Hebrew, 
Arabic, Assyrian, and Phoenician, are what is called “ triliteral,” 7.e. 
they consist of roots mostly of three consonants, and express different 
shades of grammatical meaning by altering the internal vowels. Thus 
from the root m-1-k are derived melek, a king; malak, he reigned, and 
SO On. 

The Turanian family, comprising Huns, Turks, Finns, Lapps, and 
other Mongolian races of Northern Asia, all speak agglutinative 
languages, ¢.e., languages in which the rootis put first and is followed 
by suffixes strung on to it, but not incorporated with it and remaining 
distinct. Thus in Turkish, the root sev, to love, is expanded into 
sevishdirilmedeler, meaning “incapable of being brought to love one 
another.” 

These are only given as specimens of some of the most marked of 
the vast varieties of language which have been examined and classified 
by philologists. They suggest a great many interesting reflections, 
but I confine myself to those which bear more immediately on the sub- 
ject of man’s origin and development. Tt is evident that they imply 
great antiquity for the existence, not of man only, but of separate 
races of men speaking separate languages. 

Babylonian inscriptions, quite 4,000 years old, show that the 
characteristic features of the Aryan and Semitic languages were as 
clearly established then as they are now; and the hieroglyphics of 
Egyptian monuments, 1,000 years older, show the Coptic language 
essentially the same as modern Coptic, and although presenting some 
points of analogy with Semitic, too different to be classed with it. 
If these are descended from a common ancestor, clearly their origin 
must be extremely remote. And even with unlimited time itis diffi- 
cult to conceive how such radical differences in the structure of lan- 
guages could have arisen unless the different races had branched off 
before any clear form of articulate speech had become fixed. Could 
a race accustomed for generations to the free-flowing inflectional 
Aryan, have deserted it for the cramped forms of the Semitic, or vice 
versd, could the Semite have adopted the modes of thought and 
expression of Sanscrit? And the same difficulty would apply in at least 
twenty or thirty cases of other families of language. 

It must be recollected that language is not merely the conven- 
tional instrument of thought, but toa great extent its creator, and 
the mould in which it is cast. The mould may be broken, and races 
abandon old and adopt new languages by force of external circum- 
stances, such as conquest or contact with and absorption by superior 
races, but there is no instance of its being so transformed from within 
as to pass into a totally different type. Nor can we very well see how 
root-words once attached to fundamental ideas, such for instance as 
the simpler numerals, should come to be forgotten and new and totally 
different words invented. 

Of course, the explanation was easy in the olden days, when 
everything was referred to miracle. Languages were different because 
God had made them so, to baffle the attempt of united mankind to 


MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 103 


‘build a tower high enough to reach to heaven. But the theory of 
‘special miraculous creation for each language cannot stand a moment’s 
investigation. 

As in the case of the animal world, special creations, if admitted 
at all, must be multiplied to an extent which becomes absurd. Is 
every petty tribe of savages who speak a language ‘unintelligible to 
others to be supposed to have had it conferred upon it as a miracu- 
lous gift? Was the language of the extinct Brazilian tribe, of which 
Humboldt tells us that avery old parrot spoke the last surviving 
words, one of the languages used to scatter the builders of the Tower 
of Babel? Or, still more conclusively, where we know and can prove 
that one part of a language is the product of natural laws, can we 
assume that another part of the same language is the result of miracle? 
Did it require Divine inspiration to make the old Egyptians call a cat 
miaou, or to teach so many nations to express the idea of mother by 
imitating the bleating of a lamb? If not, why should half the words 
in a dictionary be miraculous and half natural? 

And if Cesar is correctly reported to have been more proud of 
‘discovering a new case than of conquering Gaul, ought we not to “ren- 
der unto Cesar the things that are Czesar’s,” and assign grammar as well 
as words to human invention? In short, no reasonable man who studies 
the subject can doubt that language is just as much a machine of 
human invention for communicating thought, as the spinning jenny 
is for spinning cotton. 

The general conclusion, then, to be drawn from the study of 
language points in the same direction as that of all other branches of 
acience, viz., that their true history is that of evolution from simple 
origins by the operation of natural laws over long periods of time 
into forms of greater complexity and higher development. What 
language really does for us is to take up the thread where the oldest 
history fails us, and show that even at this date it is impossible to 
doubt that the human race must have been already in existence for a 
very long period, and in existence as at the present day in several 
sharply distinguished varieties, so that the common origin, if there 
be one, must be placed still further back. As history verified by the 
Egyptian monuments extends over a period of nearly 7,000 years, 
this is equivalent to saying that such a period can only be a very 
small part of the total time which has elapsed since man became an 
inhabitant of the earth. 

The origin and development of religions have been much dis- 
cussed, but too often with a desire to make theories square with 
wishes. The subject also does not admit of such precise determina- 
tion as in treating of arts and languages, which have left traces of 
themselves in the form of primitive implements and primitive roots. 

The history of religions really begins with written records, or at 
the earliest with the older myths which are embodied in these records. 
But these are all comparatively modern, and imply a considerable 
progress in civilization before they could have existed. If we wish 
to form some idea of what may have been the primitive elements from 
which religion was evolved, during the long Neolithic and still longer 
Paleolithic periods which preceded history, we must look at what are 
actually the religious ideas of contemporary savage and semi-barbarous 
aces. 

At the very lowest stage of savagery we find races like the Aus- 


104. MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


tralians, the Bushmen, the Mincopies, and the Fuegians, who cannot 
be said to have any religion at all, or at the most some vague ideas 
of ghosts and spirits. ‘The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands, who 
are considered by Professor Owen as “perhaps the most primitive, 
or lowest in the scale of civilization, of the human race,” are reported 
by Dr. Mowatt to have “no idea of a Supreme Being, no religion, nor 
any belief in a future state of existence.” Sir J. Lubbock says of the 
Australians that “they have no religion, nor any idea of prayer; 
but most of them believe in evil spirits, and all have great dread of 
witchcraft.” 

As we rise above this level of the lowest savagery we find ideas: 
of religion beginning to grow from two main tap-roots. The first is 
the idea of ghosts or spirits, which arises naturally from dreams and 
visions and develops itself into ancestor and hero-worship, and belief 
in a world of spirits, good and evil, influencing men’s lives and for- 
tunes, and in many forms of sickness taking possession of their bodies. 
This spirit-worship also necessarily leads to some dim perception of & 
future life. 

The other tap-root is the inevitable disposition to account for the 
phenomena of nature, when men first began to reflect on them, by the 
agency of invisible beings like themselves; in other words, of anthropo- 
morphic gods. This is a higher and later stage of religious belief than © 
the former, for it implies a certain disposition to inquire into the 
causes of things and a certain amount of reasoning power to infer like 
causes from like results. 

But the two often blend together, as in the religions of the Aryan 
race, in which we see deified heroes and ancestors crowding the courts 
of Olympus, with a multitude of anthropomorphic gods, who are often 
merely obvious personifications of natural phenomena or astronomical 
myths. Thus Varuna, Ouranos, or Uranus, are personifications of the: 
vault of heaven; Phoebus, the shining ‘one, of the sun; Aurora, of the 
dawn; while Hercules is half deified hero and half solar myth. Some- 
times, however, of the two stems of religion one only has flourished, 
and the other has either never existed, or been overshadowed by the 
first and relegated to a lower sphere. Thus the great Chinese civili- 
zation, comprising such a large portion of the human race, has appar- 
ently developed its religion entirely from the idea of spirits and spirit- 
worship. The worship of ancestors is its main feature, and its sacred 
books are, in effect, treatises on ethics and political economy, with rules 
for rites and ceremonies to enforce decent and decorous behavior, 
rather than what we should call works of religion. There is no trace 
of a conception of anthropomorphic gods in the genuine national | 
Chinese religion from Confucius downwards; and even the introduc- 
tion of Buddhism has done little but add the deified hero, Buddha, to 
the list of divine ancestors and give more definite shape to various 
vague superstitions. In like manner the whole Buddhist world cam 
hardly be said to recognize anything beyond their incarnate hero, 
except a Nirvana or metaphysical abstraction, rather than a personal 
deity. 

With other races again, and specially the Hebrew, the idea of a 
tribal anthropomorphic God has gradually swallowed up that of other 
gods, developed into that of one Almighty Being, and dwarfed that of 
ghosts and spirits. The primitive Hebrews, indeed, carried this so 
far as to exclude all ideas of 2 future life from their religious system. 


MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 105. 


Their primitive God, however, was strictly anthropomorphic, and 
modelled on the idea of an Oriental sultan—sometimes good and benefi- 
cent, but sometimes cruel and capricious, and above all jealous of any 
disrespect and enraged by any disobedience. Morality seems at first 
to have had little or nothing to do with these conceptions, and there is 
not the remotest trace in the early history of any religion, of its hay- 
ing been born ready-made from the necessary intuition of one Almighty 
God of love, mercy, and justice, which is so confidently assumed by 
many metaphysicians and theologians. On the contrary, conscience: 
had to be first evolved, and the process may be followed step by step 
by which, as manners became milder and ideas purer, the grosser 
attributes of Deity were gradually purged off, and the idea of a just. 
and merciful God was evolved from barbaric elements. 

These considerations, however, lead us far from the question of 
the first dawn of religion among primitive man. Judging from the. 
earliest facts of history, and the analogy of modern savage races, 
where we might look for the first traces of religious ideas would be 
from the contents of tombs and from idols. When a tribe had attained 
to some definite idea of a future life it would almost certainly bury 
weapons and implements with its dead, as is the case with modern 
savages. When it had reached the stage of worshipping anthro- 
pomorphie deities, it would probably frame images of them, some of’ 
which would be found in their tombs and dwellings. 

The latter test soon fails us. In the early Egyptian tombs, and. 
in the remains of the prehistoric cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, 
images of owl and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures 
or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic 
times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that. 
archeologists still dispute as to their existence. Certain crescents 
found in the Swiss lake-dwellings were at one time thought to indicate: 
a worship of the moon, but the better opinion seems to be that they 
were used as rests for the head during sleep, as we find similar objects. 
now used in many parts of the world. Among the many thousand 
objects recovered from these Swiss lake-dwellings and other Neolithic: 
abodes, there are only a very few which may possibly have been rude: 
idols or amulets, and the only ones which may be said with some: 
certainty to have been idols, are one or two discovered by Mons. de: 
Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period, excavated in the: 
chalk of Champagne, which appear to be intended for female figures 
of life size with heads somewhat resembling that of the owl-headed' 
Minerva. 

When we pass to Paleolithic times the evidence of idols becomes: 
more faint, and rests solely on the conjecture that some of the figures 
carved by the Reindeer-men of La Madeleine and other caves, may 
probably have been intended for amulets. As they were such skilful. 
carvers, and so fond of drawing whatever impressed itself on their 
imagination, the presumption is strong that they had not advanced to 
the stage when the worship of gods symbolized by idols had come into: 
existence, as otherwise more undoubted idols must have been found in. 
the caves which were so long their habitations, and which have yielded: 
such a number of remains of works of art. 

The evidence for a belief in a future existence and in spirits is: 
more conclusive. Throughout the whole Neolithic period we find 
objects buried with the dead which were evidently intended for use im 


106 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


a future life. We find also in many Neolithic tombs a singular fact 
which points to the existence of a very long belief in evil spirits. 
Many of the skulls, especially of young people, have been trepanned, 
that is, a piece of the skull has been cut out, making a hole, apparently 
to let out the evil spirit which was supposed to be causing epilepsy or 
convulsions; and where the patient had recovered and the wound 
healed, when he died long afterwards, a piece of the skull, including 
this trepanned portion, was sometimes cut out and used apparently as 
an amulet. The objects deposited in graves show that the idea of a 
future life was, as with most savages of the present day, that of a 
continuation of the same life as he had led here, though perhaps in 
happier hunting-grounds. In some cases a great chief seems to have 
had wives and slaves slaughtered and buried with him, though the 
proofs of this are more clear and abundant in later prehistoric times 
than during the Neolithic period. Cannibalism, however, seems to 
have occasionally prevailed both in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and pre- 
historic times, as it did so extensively among modern savage races 
before they came under civilizing influences. This is clearly proved 
by the number of human bones, chiefly of women and young persons, 
which have been found charred by fire and split open for extraction of 
the marrow. 

The evidence of belief in a future life becomes more rare and 
uncertain in Paleolithic times. Perhaps it may be because we have so 
few authentic discoveries of Paleolithic burying-places, and so many 
instances of caves, once inhabited by Paleeolithic races, being used long 
afterwards as Neolithic sepulchres. After the famous cave of Aurig- 
nac it is difficult to trust any evidence of the discovery of a real 
Paleolithic sepulchre which has not been subsequently disturbed. 

In the few cases also where Paleolithic skeletons have been found, 
as in that of the men of Neanderthal and Mentone, they have often been 
those of single individuals, and it may be doubted whether they were 
buried there, or merely died in the caves in which they lived, in which 
case any implements found with them do not necessarily imply that 
they were placed there for use in a future life. On the whole it seems 
doubtful whether any certain proofs of burials denoting knowledge of a 
future life can be found in Paleolithic times, and if there are, they are 
certainly few and far between, and confined to the later stages of that 

eriod. 
All we can say is, that religion certainly did not descend ready- 
made among these aboriginal savages, but that, like language, it was 
slowly developed from beginnings as rude as those we now find among 
the lowest races of savages. 

It may be well, however, to say here, once for all, what is appli- 
cable to many other passages in this book, that the question of the 
origin of any religion is entirely different from that of its truth or 
falsehood. To explain a thing is not to disprove it; on the contrary, 
a thing only really becomes true to us when we understand it. A 
‘stately oak, with wide-spreading branches, that give shade and shelter 
to the cattle of the fields, is not the less a fact because we know that 
it did not drop ready-made from heaven, but grew from an acorn. 
The intrinsic truth of a religion must be tested by the conformity 
which, in a given stage of its evolution, it bears to the facts of the 
universe as disclosed by science, and to the feelings and moral per- 
ceptions which have been equally developed by evolution in the 
contemporary world. 


MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. i607 


All I contend for is, that all religions have grown and been 
developed from humble origins, and that their history, impartially 
considered, does not contradict, but on the contrary greatly confirms 
the law of natural evolution. 

Of the two faculties by which man is commonly distinguished 
from the brute creation, viz., that of being the speaking and the tool- 
making animal, the former attribute has been shown to be the product 
of evolution from origins long since lost in the far-off distance of 
remote ages. 

The same remark is even more certainly true as regards the other 
attribute of tool-making, or, in its widest sense, adapting natural laws 
_ and natural objects to the arts of life by intelligent application. The 
primitive roots, so to speak, of this industrial language, which in the 
case of spoken language for the most part elude our search, are here 
furnished by the Palzolithic remains found so abundantly in river 
drifts and caves. There can be no doubt whatever that the modern 
wood-cutter’s axe and carpenter’s adze are the lineal descendants of 
the rudely-chipped hdches, or celts, which are dug out of the gravels of 
St. Acheul, or from below the stalagmite of Kent's Cavern. The 
regular progression can be traced from the mass of flint rudely chipped 
to a point, with a butt-end left rough to grasp in the hand, up to more 
symmetrical and carefully-chipped forms; to implements intended to 
be hafted or fastened to a handle; to implements ground and polished 
to a sharp edge and pierced for the handle; and finally to the finished 
specimens of the later Neolithic period, which exactly represent the 
adze and battle-axe, and are almcst identical with those used quite 
recently by the Polynesians and other semi-civilized races who had no 
access to metals. From these the transition to metals is easily traced, 
the first bronze implements and weapons being facsimiles of those of 
polished stone which they superseded, and the gradual development 
of bronze, and from bronze to the cheaper and more generally useful 
metal, iron, being a matter of quite modern history. 

In like manner, the development of the knife, sword, and all 
cutting instruments, from the primitive flint flake, can be traced step 
by step, and is beyond doubt; and equally so the development of all 
missils, from the primitive chipped flint, used as a javelin or arrow- 
head, up to the modern rifle. When we catch the first glimpes of the 
beginnings of human art or industry, the furniture or stock-in-trade of 
Paleolithic man appears to have been as follows: 

He was acquainted with fire. This seems to be clearly established 
by the charred bones, charcoal, and other traces of fire which are found 
in the oldest Paleolithic caves, and even in the far distant Miocene 
period, if we can believe in the flints discovered by the Abbé Bourgeois 
in the strata of Thenay, some of which appear to have been split by 
the action of fire. This is a remarkable fact, for a knowledge of 
the means of kindling fire is by no meansa very simple or obvious 
attainment. Apes and monkeys will sit before a fire and enjoy its 
warmth, but no monkey has yet developed intelligence enough even to 
put fresh sticks on to keep up the fire, much less to rekindle it when 
extinct. Primeval man must often have had experience of fire from 
natural causes, as from forests and prairies scorched by a tropical sun 
being set on fire by lightning, or from volcanic eruptions; but how he 
learned from these to kindle fire for himself is not so obvious. Savage 
races, as a rule, do so by converting mechanical energy into heat, by 


108 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 


the friction of a stick twirled round in a hole, or rubbed backwards: 
and forwards in a groove in another piece of wood; and there are old 
observances among civilized nations which show that this was the 
mode practiced by their ancestors, as when the sacred fire in the 
Temple of Vesta was relighted in this manner by the old Romans if it 
had chanced to be extinguished. It is probable, therefore, that this: 
was the original mode of obtaining fire, but if so, it must have required 
a good deal of intelligence and observation, for the discovery is by no 
means an obvious one, nor is it easy to see any natural process that 
micht suggest it. 

Neither ancient history nor the accounts of existing savage races 
throw much light on the question. The narratives of the discovery of 
fire contained in the oldest records are obviously mythical, like the 
fable of Prometheus, which is itself a version of the older Vedic myth 
of the god Agni (whence the Latin ignis or fire) having been taken from 
a casket and given to the first man, Manou, by Pramantha, which in 
the old Vedic language means taking forcibly by means of friction. Of 
the same character are the mythical legends of savage races of fire 
having been first brought by some wonderful bird or animal; and there 
is nowhere anything like an authentic tradition of the fact of its first 
introduction. There have been reports of savages who were unac- 
quainted with fire, but they have never been well authenticated, and 
the nearest approach to such a state of things was probably furnished 
by the aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, of whom it is said that in 
all their wanderings they were particularly careful to bear in their 
hands the materials for kindling a fire, in the shape of a firebrand, 
which it was the duty of the women to carry, and to keep carefully 
refreshed from time to time as it became dull. 

On the whole, traditions all point to fire having been first 
obtained from friction, and it is possible that the first idea may have 
been derived from the boughs of trees, or silicious stalks of bamboos, 
having been set on fire when rubbed together by the action of the 
wind. 

It is easier to see the origin of the remaining equipment of 
primitive man, viz., chipped stones, for flints splintered by frost or 
fire often take naturally the forms of ’sharp-edged flakes and rude 
hatchets or hammers, and very little invention was required to improve 
these specimens, or endeavor to imitate them by artificial chippings. 
It is rather surprising that this art did not improve more rapidly, 
for it is evident that the old Paleolithic period must have lasted a 
long time before any decided progress began to show itself. And 
during this long period a singular uniformity appears to have pre- 
vailed throughout the Paleolithic world. The rude form of the celt 
or Adche, with a blunt butt and chipped roughly to a point, is found 
in the oldest river gravels and caves wherever they have been 
investigated, and the forms of the Somme and the Thames are 
repeated in the quartzite implements of the Madras laterite. 

In the very oldest caves and river deposits the tool-equipment 
of man seems to have been very much limited to these rude celts, used 
probably for smashing skulls in war and the chase, and splitting bones 
to get at the marrow; sharp-edged flakes for cutting; rude javelin- 
heads; and stones chipped to a rounded edge, very like those used by the 
Esquimaux for scraping bones and skins. As we ascend in time we 
find arrow-heads of stone and bone, at first unbarbed and gradually 


MANS PLACE IN NATURE. 109 


becoming barbed, showing that the bow had been discovered; harpoons 
of bone and fish-hooks; bone pins and needles; and a much greater 
‘variety and more carefully-chipped forms of flint tools and weapons; 
until we finally reach the upper reindeer stage of caves like that of La 
Madeleine, where artistic drawings and carvings are found, and the 
equipment generally is superior to that of many existing savage tribes, 
and not much inferior to that of the Esquimaux and other Arctic races. 

We then pass into Neolithic times, when many of the chief 
elements of civilization are already in full force. Man has emerged in 
many localities from the hunter into the pastoral stage, the principal 
domestic animals are known, and in some of the later Jake-dweilings 
he has advanced a stage further, and has become an agriculturist living 
in villages. From this to the Bronze and early historical periods, there 
isno great break, and the ruder tribes of barbarians described by 
Cesar and Tacitus may well have been the lineal descendants of the 
Neolithic men whose polished axes and finely-shaped arrow-heads lie 
scattered over the surface of Europe and are found in innumerable 
burial-mounds and dolmens. 

But in Paleolithic times, though we can see constant progress, 
mankind is still in a state of unmitigated barbarism. Agriculture was 
clearly unknown, for the hand-mills, pestles, and mortars, which are 
among the most enduring and abundant relics where grain was used 
for food, are never met with. Pottery was unknown in all the earlier 
periods, and it is questionable whether even the rudest forms of baked 
clay, moulded by hand, are found where there is no intermixture of a 
subsequent Neolithic habitation. The dog was clearly not a companion 
of man prior to the era of the Danish kitchen-middens, for the spongy 
parts of bones which are always gnawed by dogs when dogs are present, 
are invariably preserved in the débris of Paleolithic caves, and the few 
bones of dogs, wolves, and foxes found with human remains in these 
caves almost always show that the animals had formed part of the 
food of the inhabitants. 

Other domestic animals were, in all probability, equally unknown, 
although it has been thought possible that some of the tribes of the 
reindeer period may have had herds of the balf-tame deer, like the 
modern Laplanders. This conjecture, however, appears to rest solely 
on the large number of bones and horns found at certain stations, 
which may have arisen from their having been occupied for a very long 
period, and as the dog was unknown, it seems probable that no other 
animals had been domesticated. : 

As regards clothing, the first certain proofs of its use are afforded 
by the bone pins and needles, which were evidently employed for 
fastening the skins of animals together, and the scrapers were probably 
used for scraping these skins and fashioning the bone implements. It 
is probable, therefore, that the use of skins as a protection against the 
cold of the Glacial period, was known at a very early period. 

Ornaments, also, are of very early date, as pierced shells, some 
times fossil, and pierced tecth of the bear and other animals an, 
frequently found under circumstances which show that they muss 
have been strung together as necklaces. The skeleton found in a cave 
at Mentone had anumber of perforated shells of Nassa, and a few 
stag’s teeth also perforated, dispersed about the skull, so as to show 
that they had formed some sort of head ornament. Lumps of red 
hematite, also, probably used for paint, have been found in some of 
the caves of the reindeer period 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARROW. 











Nagata y ile \ oe 
Tage ih i aly 4 
oi ri \ at 

Yi ome 






yt 
“] 
‘Vv 


My 
Is 





we aig Ie 
. FP pap A USE 
Fitnt: Arrow in. Veerenra oF REINDEER) Yl PALA£OLITHIC. : 
Paleolithic; | La Madeleine. Mammoth Period, Le Monstiert 





PaLZOLITHIC. 
(Reindeer Period. 





PALZOLITHIC. 
Reindeer Period. _ PALHOLITHIC. 
First vestige of barb. Reindeer Periods 





NeEourric 
Denmark} Eequimaux. 


(rom Labbock’ : «“ rehistoric Times.”’) 


NEOLITHIC. 
Denmark. 





MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE. 111, 


Captain Cook’s description of the savages of Tierra del Fuego 
would have applied to them, that, “although content to be naked, they 
were very ambitious to be fine;” and probably like these poor Fue- 
gians, they adorned themselves with streaks of red, black, and white, 
and wore bracelets and anklets of shell and bone. 

If we wish to form some idea of the manners and customs of our 
Paleolithic ancestors, we must look for them among the existing 
savage races, whose mode of life, and equipment of tools and weapons, 
most nearly resemble those of the earliest cave-dwellers. The Austra- 
lians, the Bushmen of South Africa, the Mincopies of the Andaman 
Islands, and the Fuegians are probably the lowest specimens of the 
human race known in modern times; but even these are in some 
respects further advanced in the arts than the first Paleolithic man. 
The Bushmen are skilled in the use of the bow, and have discovered 
the art of poisoning their arrows. The Australians, Mincopies, and 
Fuegians have canoes, harpoons, and fish-hooks. The latter approach 
more nearly to the conditions of life of the savages who accumulated 
the kitchen-middens on the coasts of Denmark at a much later period, 
and the Bushmen probably represent better those of the cave-men who 
lived principally on the produce of the chase of large animals, such as 
the mammoth, rhinoceros, cave bear, horse, and deer. The pigmy- 
Bushman will attack the elephant, the rhinoceros, and even the lion, 
and often succeed in killing them by pitfalls or poisoned arrows. 

The inferences, therefore, to be drawn, alike from the physical 
development of the individual man, and from the origin and growth of 
all the faculties which specially distinguish him from the brute creation 
—language, religion, arts, and science—all point to the conclusion that 
he is a product of laws of evolution, and not of special or miraculous 
creation. 

Still, admitting this, we must admit on the other hand, that until 
more of the “missing links” are discovered, and the origin of man is 
placed on a basis of scientific certainty, there is an opening left for the 
belief that here, if nowhere else, there was some supernatural inter- 
ference with the laws of Nature, and that the finger of the clock-maker 
did here alter the hands of the clock from the position which they 
would have occupied under the original law of its construction. But 
if this were so, it must equally in candor be admitted that the miracle 
did not consist in placing man and woman upon earth, at any recent 
period, or with faculties in any way developed, but could only have 
consisted in causing a germ or germs to come into existence, different 
from any that could have been formed by natural evolution, and con- 
taining within them the possibilities of conscious and civilized man, to 
be developed from the rudest origins by slow and painful progress 
over countless ages. 


Pe) 
PA st eh 
en ew: 


i 
eh pila, 4 





ea AND PRESENT -DEVELOPME 


- BY FREDRIK BJORNSTROM, M. D.,! 


a Physician of the Stockholm Hospital, Professor of Psychiatry, Late Royal Swe 
‘eee . Medical Counselor. 


Authorized Translation from the Second Swedish Edition. 
By BARON NILS POSSE, M. G., 
Director of the Boston School of Gymnastics, 


Paper Cover (No. 113 of he Humbold: Library), - 
: oth, ‘Extra, 
Lie \ 


ie 7 PRESS NOTICES. 

a8 > ‘The learned Swedish physician, Bj6rnstr6m.—Churchman. 

 Itisa strange and mysterious subject this hypnotism.— 7he Sun. 

Perhaps as concise as any work we have.—S, California Practitioner, 

- We have found this book exceedingly interesting.—California Homepath fo 
| +e Bests: PROLouels and scientific examination of a little-understood sub} sct —Epise 
ee “2007 ers ot 


Pet Few of the new books have more interest for scientist and layman alike.—Sunday Time 
Boston) 


aneehe study of hypnotism is in fashion again. Itisa fea ok Ut and dangerous —- 


netic subject will be fsdinating to many, and it receives a cautious yet sympathet 
tment in this book. —Lvangeltst., 


Be iucoe Swedish alienist known to American students of pavocea psychiatry. —Medica 
dard (Chicago). 


his is a highly interesting and instructive book. Hypnotism is on the onward marck sie 
ie front as a scientific subject for serious thought and investigation. —The Medical fre if 
ss (Indianapolis). 


any of the mysteries of mesmerism, and all that class of manifestation, are “her: be 
d- at length, and explained as far as they can be with our present knowledge of psy- 


1e marvels of hypnotic phenomena increase with investigation. 


Dr. Bjdrnstrém, i in 
s clear and well-written essay, has given about all that modern science has been ae a 
elop of these phenomena.—Jedical Visitor (Chicago). 


has become a matter of scientific research, and engages the attention of some of fda. 
a meén of the day, like Charcot, of Paris. It is interesting reading, outside of any 


interesting book contains a. Beye: accoint of the history, acvelopaeeal 
aspect of hypnotism. As a whole, the book is of great interest and very ins 


s worthy of careful perusal by all physicians, and contains Nata unfit to he oe 
oe, and Surgical REDRGLEE Gorse veracity 


None the aes however doe s it 
practitioner chabueid what it Goes, even if he cannot. tell just what i it is 


strom’s book ms to give a jeneral review of the en ire 























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